I am absolutely committed to growing the size of the dreams my kids have. Josiah loves rockets. Rather than just pulling up a video on rockets, Olga and I decided we had to take a trip to Cape Canaveral so he can see and hear the rockets. I don’t want him to dream about iPad rockets. I want to know that he can be there with them. And, if he wants, one day he can live among the stars (I think Olga and I would prefer they stay on Earth 🤞).

I know I dreamt big. I wanted to be a 6’4” defensive end in the NFL. And if that didn’t work out, then I definitely wanted some high-paying cushy job. I wanted to have a huge house and have a Mercedes-Benz GT parked out front by a water fountain on a brick driveway. I’d travel anywhere and whenever. I wanted so badly… to be someone else. Maybe at the time I was unable to realize it, but they were all birthed from the dissatisfaction I had with myself and the life I was living. I was so uncomfortable being me and being here, I dreamt about being someone else.

I want my kids to dream big. But I do not want them to sacrifice who they are in order to become someone they were never born to be.

I want my kids’ dreams born out of a knowledge and fullness of who they were created to be. Big dreams aren’t born from running away from yourself. It’s fulfilling who you are made to be.

I know from experience that you can accomplish so much more when you know yourself, rather than trying to become someone else.

As for me, I found myself when I began to follow Jesus my senior year of high school. Before Jesus, I wanted to be someone else. Once I opened my life to Jesus, I came to know and love the me that is with Christ.

When a person is baptized, it is a symbol of a type of death. The Christian believes that in the waters, a person is buried. When they are brought up out of the waters they present themselves as a new creation, having experienced a second birth. Now, it is not the waters that produce this result, it is only a symbol of what is happening in the person by the Spirit of God.

There is a mystery in this. When we are raised to new life in Christ, just as Jesus was raised from the dead, it is no longer I who lives but now Christ who lives in me. And yet, Christ who lives in us still does very much use our personal stories and gifting for eternal purposes.

And so, I am convinced that the truest form of ourselves is experienced only when Christ is invited to lead us. In sin, God is not invited to live in us. But in rebirth, Christ lives in us, and we experience the fullness of human life as it was intended before humans knew sin.

I want my kids to dream big. And the only dreams worth dreaming are ones birthed out of knowing ourselves. And we can only know ourselves in Jesus.

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