What is so important to you that you would give your life for it?
What would it look like if we saw our suffering as a tool to unlock our dreams? How would we approach suffering differently?
Every choice you have ever made has led you to this moment. Every choice has consequences and it involved relationships along the way. Some of those relationships have propelled you to see beyond your circumstances to achieve things you did not see as a possibility. Other relationships have changed you, grown you and caused you to learn, and those lessons were hard-fought and challenging.
We will hear Martin Luther King, Jr’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech quoted on the day we celebrate his life and legacy. I have a lesser-known speech that makes me cry when I listen. It is titled Beloved Community.
One of my favorite lines that speak to my heart is “Let us fight passionately and unrelentingly for the goals of justice and peace.” Each time I hear it, a voice within me agrees wholeheartedly…I say yes!
The journey from the Wilderness to the Promised Land is written in the Book of Deuteronomy. The Israelites leaving slavery and bondage in Egypt, having witnessed miracles of nature and God’s favor and daily provision found themselves traveling for forty years in the desert. If they had followed a map it should have taken less than two weeks. When they arrived and surveyed the land that had been promised to them, they realized that a generation of Israelites had died on the long journey. Why do some of us not fully realize our dream of entering into our own Promised Land? (That will be in another blog post! Stay tuned.)
Dr. King references the Promised Land in his speech, which resonates with my journey in business and faith. He passionately makes a call to action in this speech “ All men will respect the dignity and worth of all human personality. And then we will be in Canaan’s Freedom land.” There is so much that happens before stepping into the Promised Land. Being in the Promised Land has its own battles. Dr. King called us to fight these and all battles with love and reminded us that when we struggle for justice, we do not struggle alone. God is with us in the struggle. We all have struggles, they are different brands of struggle. Some are physical, relational, spiritual and emotional and those are only some of the most common.
What would it look like if we saw our suffering as a tool to unlock our dreams? How would we approach suffering differently? One of my favorite quotes is from Peter J. Daniels who challenged each of us “The price of a big dream or a little dream is the same, it’s your lifetime.” What if we had a different perspective around suffering? Would it propel us to seek bigger dreams versus settling for smaller dreams? I have spent over two and half decades developing my business, changing my mindsets and seeking truth to answer these questions.
