The other day Brandon and I went to a coffee shop and just left space to be able to dream.
It was absolute perfection to me. It’s what I did all the time when I was single.
We ventured out on a rainy day, to our favorite local coffee shop on the river, and I had a latte so obviously I was content.
What I forgot to mention is that what spurred this outing was a conversation Brandon and I had where we had some deep revelations about each other.
We realized that I love to dream. It makes me think that I am a 6w7 (not a wing 5) on the enneagram. Despite my fear, my loyalty to relationships, and my comfort in the predictable I love to dream about the future. I love to try new places. I love possibilities. And for a long time, I think that zeal for new and different and not settling into contentment was how I combatted fear. It was in those seasons that I felt the most free.
Brandon on the other hand told me that he doesn’t like to dream, which I found astonishing. First of all, how did I not know this about him? Second of all, dreaming is the most creative, fun, free and liberating part of life!!
I feel like God created us for that.
But what I discovered is that Brandon doesn’t like to dream because he feels like if he dreams, then it turns into a plan. Then if he can’t complete that plan without detours, he is a failure. Totally not true, but very real feelings to him. Not completing the dreamed up plan in the right time and space would create conflict and my 9w1 husband would be devastated.
Really it makes so much sense to know now, and thankfully we balance each other out and challenge each other in areas we wouldn’t dare enter into alone. Team work makes the dream work…
So we scheduled a time on a long, holiday weekend to connect face to face and think and dream and sift through partitioned prayers about where we wanted to be in five, ten, fifteen years…and it was one of the best days for our book.
I don’t think that we really give ourselves that space as much as we should.
Things always have to make sense. We have to play it safe. We have to plan and execute and repeat and we fall into a cycle of dreamlessness that will crush us into the dust of delay. The longer we put it off, the more unlikely it is that we will re-enter that creative space.
Personally, Brandon and I don’t believe that every thing we are supposed to do next will just magically come to us.
We have to be willing to say yes. We have to say yes to dreaming, thinking, planning, trying and succeeding.
We also have to say yes to humility. We have to say yes to being re-directed, changed, failure and we have to be willing to try again.
We quickly realized we have to be willing to dream and we have to be willing to let things change. We also realized that what we do and what God does with our lives might be different than what people would expect us to do, what the people are doing around us or what people have done before us.
We are learning that we love community. We don’t just love people (even though our people have our hearts!!) but we love how community feels. We want that to influence where we live, how we schedule our weeks, and what we do with our free time.
We are learning that we value experiences. We have quickly fallen in love with artistic and performing arts culture. We value it and we think that it makes the world a better place.
We are learning that we value music. Neither of us are necessarily “musically inclined” but we love music. It speaks to deep places in our hearts and makes us feel at peace and a little more alive than we do in silence.
We are learning and working our way towards immense generosity. Not because we feel obligated, but because we know that our hearts are tied to our money. We also know that there are amazing organizations we want to partner with who are the experts at reaching people for the sake of the gospel, cultivating community culture, fighting the mental health stigma and loving on populations of people who are no less than, that just need help.
In a generation saturated with starting something new, we hope to support while doing some new things of our own.
We are learning that, for us, we want time before adding more to our family than our bug eyed Boston Terrier. We are learning that God might have a different, beautiful, and equally as satisfying story for how he weaves in the next generation of our family. We are learning to be open handed and that love binds beyond biology.
I could go on and on and on…
When we left the coffee shop that day to go get tacos I realized that I hadn’t felt this in a long time.
The feeling of a stirred heart, of fresh possibilities and of encouragement that a beautiful story is being written.
I was reminded that I have to be willing to sit in that space. I have to be willing to let ideas come and go and I have to be willing to do some stuff. None of the things that were the absolute best in my life came by sitting, waiting and wishing. They all came by me DOING something whether it went how I thought or there were some back roads I had to take.
Just a couple weeks after Brandon and I relocated for his job we went out to get ice cream. On our drive home I told Brandon “I want to create a beautiful life.” I didn’t know what that meant, or how it is going to happen, but that was what was clearly written in my mind. I don’t want to get to the end and wish it was any different.
A few weeks after that, we were watching Brené Brown’s Netlfix special and she said something that stopped me so hard…
“We are terrified to feel joy.We are so afraid that if we let ourselves feel joy, something will come along and rip it from us and we will get sucker punched by pain and trauma and loss. So in the midst of great things we dress rehearse tragedy.”
The Celeste Elizabeth 