Leave A Mark

Introduction

Preparing for a Dream

Do you have a lifelong dream? Is it well defined and written down? Does pursuing it give your life purpose? Experts speculate that only 3 percent of Americans have a dream they have written down. This number is surprisingly low, considering the dynamic role a dream can play in your life. You’ll improve your life dramatically and change the world in amazing ways by pursing a dream.

Martin Luther King Jr. captivated an entire nation by declaring, “I have a dream!” Those four words are full of potential, yet rarely spoken. Two years after declaring his dream, King witnessed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and became the youngest person ever to receive the Nobel Peace Prize—all because of his dream.

Your dream plays a crucial role in the purpose of your life because your character is uniquely challenged and purely refined while you pursue it. For decades I have helped countless people pursue their dreams. In the process I have learned that, given the right tools, anyone can pursue a dream and achieve his or her destiny.

It’s not surprising to find that Christians such as Martin Luther King Jr. have been among history’s most profound dreamers. They have also been few and far between, pursuing their dreams sporadically throughout history. Despite the numbers, their stories show how much God was able to accomplish through them. Jesus is the ultimate example of all God can do through one person with a dream. Today, God is looking for untold millions of people to discover their destinies and pursue their dreams.

Dreams are a natural part of life and one of the best ways you have of expressing your faith. All of the ancient heroes of faith mentioned in the New Testament book of Hebrews have demonstrated by the way they lived their lives that even if you love God and love others, you ought to also be pursuing the dream that will enable you to fulfill your destiny.

Do you ever wonder about your purpose in life or your destiny? If you have ever asked for advice about what you should do with your life, in response you were probably asked to define what you are good at. Then you were probably encouraged to do whatever that was. This advice is confusing because it’s great advice for establishing your goals but not for identifying your destiny. Yet the advice is usually the same whether you ask a parent, professor, pastor, or priest. You’re left to speculate that there may be more to life than goals, but you are at a loss for where to turn for answers.

Pursuing a dream and fulfilling your destiny doesn’t mean doing more of what you are already good at. Instead—and it’s critically important for you to understand—pursuing a dream means becoming the person you really want to be. The dream that will enable you to fulfill your destiny is not a type of goal. Goals come from your strengths. Goals represent wants and desires that you try to obtain with your natural abilities, skills, and ambitions. A dream is different because it comes from a predominant need or weakness that keeps pushing you until you finally begin pushing back. Your dream is designed to confront the shortcoming that plagues you most. A dream challenges you to excel where you are most vulnerable. You never begin with the strength you need to achieve your dream. But if you embrace it anyway, you will learn how to grow in new ways, depend on God, and develop as an individual. It’s a fact of life. However, it’s not presented as a guide for living in many sources other than Leave a Mark.

You only get one shot at a rewarding life. At the end of your life, as you look back at your experiences, if you achieved your goals but only grew in the areas of life you were already good at, how satisfied are you really going to be? What if, at the same time, you also faced your predominant need or weakness and designed a dream that challenged you to be strong and competent in that area of your life too? Then, with God’s help, you could achieve your dream as well as your goals and finally become the person you really want to be. Won’t that be far more satisfying?

Try to achieve something more than just surviving comfortably in life. A more rewarding and balanced life—that’s what you will find in a dream. Your natural abilities, skills, and ambitions all help you achieve your goals and improve the quality of your life, but they may not improve the kind of person you are. You cannot expect your goals alone to somehow transform your life. You must pursue a dream as well as goals in order to experience a balanced approach to life.

Leave a Mark takes the complex and mysterious idea of designing a dream and turns it into a manageable process using the Dream Machine. The Dream Machine is an easy-to-understand study guide that poses coaching questions. These questions are designed to help you easily apply the information presented in Leave a Mark to your own life. The Dream Machine won’t spell out specific answers. Instead, it will help connect the dots in a way that enables you to determine the answers that are right for you. Each person will arrive at a different conclusion, even though you will all find your answers in the same way.

You will design several dreams that match up with your well-defined destiny, determine which dream will make you happiest, and research the facts concerning that particular dream so you know exactly what to do in order to achieve it. Finally, you will take the first step necessary to begin pursuing your dream. At that point, you will discover something your goals never gave you: a powerful and dynamic hope for the future, and the expectation that you are actually going to achieve your dream.

Afterward you will be ready to embrace your role as an expert—to be optimistic, have fun, and love others while expressing who you are at your core. Then you will be able to help others achieve their dreams and observe how their dreams and yours all play a role in an amazing master plan. You will also be able to speak with others about about God more easily once you understand God’s dream, Jesus’ dream, and the Spirit of God’s dream. A voice from somewhere inside tells you that even though you might feel insecure or incapable, you can actually achieve an extraordinary dream once you decide to face your most predominant need or weakness. The voice you hear is not meant to make you feel uncomfortable with yourself. Instead, it holds out a promise, a clue that will guide you to something you ought to be searching for: a better life.

People hear the voice in different ways and search for their destinies in different areas of life. Professionals like to be motivated. Single adults strive for happiness in relationships. Homemakers try to find identities beyond wife and mom. Blue-collar workers yearn for more than a paycheck-to-paycheck existence. Empty nesters start over, while teenagers try for the first time to figure out what life is all about. College students often struggle to determine what to major in, while graduates begin building their careers. Everyone’s searching for some sense of destiny for his or her life.