It's About the Vision

It’s About the Vision 

“If only. Those must be the two saddest words in the world.” 
Mercedes Lackey 

When it comes to 2019 do the words “if only” ring through your thoughts and heart? For too many years to count I lived with regrets. I had big dreams and my life didn’t look anything like I had planned. Being in an unsuccessful marriage and then seeing it end after 20 years gave me more than enough reason to feel like a failure. I had tried as hard as I could. I did everything I knew to do and still I failed. That was 2002. I had decisions to make. Would I continue to live my life the way I always had or would I begin to make the changes necessary to live the life I dreamed of? For me the answer was easy. I was 40 years old and things were about to change. I am an all or nothing person. If I’m in, I'm ALL in. I purposed to change my life and start the journey towards becoming the person I was created to be and the person I wanted to be. Here I am, 17 years later, and I can safely say I am someone I love being. My life is better than I had even dreamed. 

So, I hear you saying, “Great for you, but that is not where I am.” Getting to the place in my life where I can honestly say I love my life wasn’t something that happened overnight. It was a journey and it was filled with hills and valleys. However, there is one thing I did that made it work. I decided to look at the past, learn from it, but never live in it. I could have allowed myself to consider myself a failure after trying and failing for 20 years. I could have just thrown in the towel and decided that was as good as it was going to get for me. I just couldn’t do that because I believed that God’s plans for me were good. Jeremiah 29:11 became my life verse at that time in my life. “For I know the plans that I have for you, declares the LORD, 'plans for welfare and not for calamity to give you a future and a hope.” 

Learning to look at the past, learn from the past, and not live in it, is the secret sauce. Every part of your past has brought you to the place where you are now. Performing an assessment of what worked and what didn’t is crucial to not repeating past mistakes. Being brutally honest with yourself is probably the hardest part of all. Either we have a tendency to overlook the bad things about it and make them all rosy, or we are hyper critical and only see it as failure. Neither is accurate. You did some things well and there are always things that need to be improved. 

Do you have a vision for your life? Creating a vision is one thing you can do to ensure that you are more successful. Proverbs 29:18a says: “Where there is no vision, the people perish:” In Habakkuk 2:2 God gives us clear instructions about creating a vision. “And the LORD answered me: “Write the vision; make it plain on tablets, so he may run who reads it.” One of the first things you must do to create a vision is to take an honest assessment of where you are and where you have been. Then you need to ask yourself "where do I want to be?" As you begin to lay out these ideas, then you can form them into a vision that gives direction to your life. If you already have a vision, assessment of where you are in relationship to that vision is crucial to keep you moving forward. Again, an honest assessment of your past is vital. Sometimes, as we assess the past, we may need to ask others to help us look at what is accurate. If you are married and the vision is for your marriage, make sure you and your spouse are both discussing where you are and where progress was made and where you have come up 

short. After assessing the past, you can then begin to refine your vision for the future. When you see where you are wanting to go, it makes it so much easier to get there. 

If you need help learning how to create a vision for your marriage or yourself, we can help. Getting started is as simple as writing an email. Send an email for help to contact@bridgebuildermm.org.