God-Sized Dreams: A 30-Day Journey of Faith and CourageSample

When Your God-Sized Dream Is Hard

Sara Frankl spent the last years of her life confined to the walls of her home due to a debilitating medical condition. Still a young woman, she had to face that many of her God-sized dreams—like marrying and raising a family—would not come true the way she imagined.

And yet she held tight to the dream that mattered most to her: encouraging others with her words. She could no longer do that at an office job, but she continued to do so from her laptop at home. After Sara slipped home to Jesus, hundreds of stories of lives she had quietly and privately changed came pouring out on the internet.

I don’t know what Sara imagined her life would be like when she grew up. But I’m certain the illness she faced was not part of the plan. She could have given up or given in to self-pity. Instead, she persevered and chose to see her limitations as opportunities.

Henry Cloud and John Townsend say this in How People Grow:

"Jesus turns our natural bent upside down. In the world’s view, the path to glory is being 'on top of it' or 'having it all together.' In Jesus’s way, the path to glory is experiencing pain and suffering: 'Now if we are children, then we are heirs—heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ, if indeed we share in his sufferings in order that we may also share in his glory' (Romans 8:17 NIV)."

When we think of God-sized dreams, it’s easy to picture a path that takes us away from suffering rather than into it. Yet Scripture shows us that suffering is part of the journey. That means when our God-sized dream gets hard, we don’t have to say, “I must be doing something wrong.” Instead, we can find comfort in knowing that Christ himself faced suffering as he fulfilled his God-sized dream of redeeming the world.

This comes with a caveat: we are talking about purposeful suffering. Cloud and Townsend add, “He chose the path of the Cross because of the fruit it would bear for all of us. Yet he refused to enter suffering that would be inappropriate for his purposes.”

In other words, suffering for the sake of suffering is not what God has in mind. Sometimes we go to the other extreme and believe we must suffer all the time in order to be godly. But Scripture makes it clear that God desires a life of joy for us.

Suffering is intended to be temporary—whether it is resolved in this life or when we enter eternity. God wants us to thrive. Even Jesus endured the cross “for the joy set before him” (Hebrews 12:2 NIV). So we are not to be surprised by suffering, and yet we’re also not to simply accept it as the way things must be forever. We can ask God, “What is your purpose in this?”

You will have hard days on the road to your God-sized dream. You will face disappointments. You will experience setbacks. Yet in the middle of this, you can trust that God’s purposes will prevail and you are truly, deeply loved. That enables us to do what Sara did—choose joy and let nothing stand in the way of completing God’s purpose for our lives.

Go Deeper

Read Romans 8:17-28 to learn more about how God is working for your good even when your God-sized dream is hard.

God, thank you that I can trust you even in the middle of suffering. Jesus knows what it’s like to experience pain on the path to a God-sized dream, and that’s so comforting to me. I ask that you give me the strength, courage, and hope I need to move forward, no matter what happens in my life. Amen.

What’s one truth you want to remember?

What’s the next small step you’ll take?