Home Pastors Articles for Pastors How to Recover Your Dreams and Change Your Ministry

How to Recover Your Dreams and Change Your Ministry

Most of us dream in the wrong direction.

When confronted with a job we don’t love or a life that feels purposeless, we look forward to the future and ask big discovery questions:

What do I want to be when I grow up? What do I want to do with my life? What is my calling?

In that moment, the answer we get is often a little terrifying because every option in the world is on the table.

Should I get a new job?

Do I need to go back to school?

Could I volunteer more?

Start my own nonprofit?

Take up a new hobby?

Find a sport I enjoy?

What’s my dream? What’s my passion? What’s my next move forward?

As we survey the black hole of endless possibility, we often get overwhelmed in that moment. We don’t know where to start when we ask discovery questions, so we stop. We freeze. We get paralyzed and give up dreaming before we’ve even really begun.

But what if dreaming were an act of recovery instead of an act of discovery? Of rescuing something from your past that was lost, something you put down because life got too busy? Dreams are usually the first thing to get bumped off the to-do list when the day gets full. Something that someone who mattered to you told you didn’t matter. A teacher, a parent, a peer said, “You’re not good enough to do that. You could never turn that into a full-time job. That would never make enough money to live on.” So you stopped.