all dreaming starts with curiosity

All dreaming starts with curiosity. A simple question.

• Could I really…
• Would I want to…
• What would it be like if…

Curiosity sparks our imaginations, and we begin to wonder.

Think about it. We did it all the time as kids. We wondered what it would be like to be an Olympic figure skater or an astronaut or the President of the United States. Our minds would race with excitement, possibility, and more questions.

• Who would I invite to dinner if I were President of the United States?
• Who would I want to go to space with?
• I wonder what it feels like to win a gold medal.

We were awakened with a sense of wonder and awe. But somewhere down the road, as we grew and changed and gained responsibilities, we lost our sense of wonder.

We stopped wondering what it would be like if…

We started focusing instead on making the GPA, getting the scholarship, graduating, finding the right guy or girl, getting married, paying bills, buying a house that we couldn’t afford, managing debt and expectations and loss and grief and fear and anxiety and love and babies and the crazy world around us.

And in the middle of all that, we forgot what it was like to wonder.

Don’t feel bad. It happens to all of us.

We’ve had over 100 people sit at our table over the past 5 years, and we ask every single one of them the same questions:

• What do you want?
• What would you do if you could do anything?
• What if you didn’t have to worry about money?
• What do you love to do?
• What are you good at?

Some of them seem like unrealistic questions. Like fantasy almost. So our survival brains tells us don’t even need to answer them.

(You could never do those things. It doesn’t matter. You have a mortgage.)

But your heart…your heart wants to answer. Your heart is still curious.

• What if I quit my corporate job and became a coach?
• What if we downsized?
• What if we traveled?
• What if we focused on experiences instead of things?
• What if we had a vision and a purpose for a family and our future?
• What if there were something more than the day to day?

Your heart wants to know. Your heart still has a sense of awe and wonder. And your heart matters.

See if you’re a Christ follower and you’ve accepted Jesus as your Lord and Savior, you have been given a new heart. It’s a heart that was made to align with God’s heart and with His love and His law and His order of things. And as your heart aligns to the heart of God, your dreams and desires not only become some fantasy what if‘s, they become the thing you were made to do.

But so many of us believe that the dreams lying dormant inside our hearts are selfish, unworthy, not important, or that we can’t actually do them.

Those are lies. The reality is that thing that your heart beats for that you push down over and over again, day after day, is the thing the very thing that you were made to do.

And we wonder why our society is riddled with comparison, anxiety, and fear. We wonder why we’re not healing or growing or becoming more of who we were made to be.

I wonder if the solution is simpler than we’re making it out to be.

I wonder if the solution lies in our hearts, in the dreams and desires and gifts and talents that are all muddled together, mushed up, and waiting to be watered, planted, rooted, cared for, and grown into the thing that we were made to do.

I wonder that not only for you, but also for me.

Our dream chasing journey started five years ago after having a double mastectomy. That surgery and recovery season made me rely on others and left me completely helpless to take care of myself. As a doer and achiever and a self proclaimed perfectionist, it was a hard season.

What I didn’t know then is that it was the most beautiful season the Lord could have ever given me. It was a season of rest and reflection that I desperately needed in my life because I had a whole bunch of smooshed up stuff in my heart that I was ignoring. That season of rest brought to the surface dreams and desires and passions that I had completely forgotten about or ignored. That season was also transformational for my husband as we relied on each other in new ways and bonded like we never had.

A year or so after my surgery, Brian came to me and suggested that we should help other people have better marriages. And I said no.

It sounded crazy. I felt unequipped. And it didn’t seem like it was our problem to solve. (p.s. dreams worth chasing often feel this way at first)

But it was a desire and a dream calling from deep within his heart that was not going be ignored any longer. I kept saying no every time he brought it up, and he kept pressing. Before I knew it I found myself in my office sitting with a couple across from us who had a similar story. They were building a business together, and they realized they didn’t like each other all that much. We had been there years before and were on the other side of it.

So we talked and we shared and it turned out that helping people have better marriages was really just that simple…sharing our experiences was helpful. A few months later Brian suggested that we host couples in our home in a retreat type setting to give them tools to create vision and better communication in their marriages.

Again, I said no. And again, he kept pressing. Before I knew it, we were hosting couples in our home with an attempt to help them have better businesses but also better marriages. The retreat after that first one would be solely about marriage, about helping couples Dream together and create a vision, purpose, and legacy in their lives and their families. And we wanted to give them tools to fight better, to love better, to serve each other better, to communicate better, and so on.

That retreat changed my life. It reminded me that I didn’t need to have all the answers, and that I didn’t need to be perfect to help. I didn’t even have to have experienced all of the things these couples had experienced, but if we were willing to share our hospitality, our gifts, and the things we had learned, then we could take married couples from good to great.

Months later we would host a similar retreat for women and a dream and desire that had been lying dormant in my heart would be awakened. I was stepping into all of the dreams that were lying so quiet and cold in my heart, and I knew that there were women who had dreams in their hearts that just needed a little pushing and prodding to come to life. So we hosted a retreat in Mexico to ask those questions.

• What do you want?
• What if you…..
• What do you wish you could do or see or become?

I saw the lies that women were believing about who they were and about what they could and couldn’t do. And we did the work to break the lies down and replace them with truth. We spoke truth over each other and our circumstances, and we all walked away with new vision and purpose. Myself included.

The biggest thing we asked of those women and those couples and ourselves was the simplest and hardest question to answer…

What do you want?

It’s a curiosity question. It’s a wonder question. It’s an awe question.

After hosting dozens of retreats for both women and couples over the past five years, Brian and I have learned that most people simply don’t know what they want unless you ask them to do some digging to uncover the dreams buried in their hearts.

And when those dreams have been lying dormant for so long, they believe the lie that it would be selfish to chase that dream, or to do that thing, or to become that person. And there’s nothing farther from the truth.

The most beautiful thing we get to watch is when couples come to our table and walk away with vision. We prep them first and give them a 30,000 foot view of their lives, and then we send them off with questions and journaling prompts where they spend time digging into what it is they really want.

Those few minutes of discovery have ultimately brought radical change to so many peoples’ lives because they took the time and had the courage to believe that those dreams and desires inside their hearts mattered and that they were worth pursuing.

Brian and I are in the middle of dream chasing right now. We decided to do the thing that seems crazy. We decided to practice what we preach. We listed our dream house, sold it in eight days, moved our family of six from a 5,000 square-foot house to a manufactured home on 50 acres.

And it all started with curiosity.

It started with a question…

What if we could help make other people’s marriages better?

What if we had a place where people could come and rest and dream and heal and grow?

What if we could create that place?

As I write this, I have been walking and praying circles around our field. The field where we plan on planting wildflowers and building a space for retreats, weddings, and family events… A place for people to come and rest and dream heal and grow. We have a long way to go, but we’re on our way.

And it all started with a question

What if we could…

I wonder what you’re wondering about today. Wonder is not a commitment. It’s just a question…

• What if I could….
• What if we could….
• What would it look like to….
• What if I did…

All dream chasing starts with curiosity.

Today, would you be brave enough to be curious?

More details to come on all the dream chasing soon, but in the meantime start with curiosity.

End note: I’m currently wondering if I could learn how to fly a hot air balloon. And then one day buy one to fly over that field of wildflowers.

Why not? It’s just curiosity.