I'm a wild one, Jesus, I'm a wild one'
“I will walk in liberty.”
I used to be able to fly. Each and every day for months on end I would stand in my lounge on the arm of our well used green velour sofa, and I would fly, but only as far as to the door of the kitchen and back again. Sometimes if I gained enough momentum I could change the height of my flight and sometimes it would be flying for minutes, at other times, just seconds. Then I think, why did I never show someone I could fly? Why did I not make the papers, why, when I stop being able to?
Of course, flying is not humanely possible, that’s a fact. Yes? Yet, there’s something inside of me that wants to believe that I could fly, however irrational that is, or however much someone else would just tell me it was only a recurring dream, or a childhood fantasy.
When I think about our lives, when was the point, the moment where we are torn from our freedom of thought and mind, our ears tuned into this worlds reality and not another, allowing it to tell us what is possible? When did we start believing things can or can’t be done? When we stop being fearless and start counting the cost? When did we allow our dreams to become so easily distilled and diluted. Dreams never dreamed, let alone achieved….
And, dreaming again, becoming child-like again, seeing possibility and feeling liberty again is what the Father is teaching me.
When I was in Kenya a few years back, I had the blessing of helping lead a bible study for 10-20 women within a cramped and dingy shop in the commercial district of Kibera slum. Each woman who came to that bible study, along with many of their children, were HIV positive, and the shop that we found ourselves in each week was filled with the fruits of their labour in order to raise money for medication, school fees and food. On my final week before leaving I got to take the women outside of the slum on a trip to a beautiful public park. For many of these women, this was the first time they had seen outside of the overwhelming expanse of slum sprawl; the clothing lines, rubble and sewers that had for so long occupied their vision. So, as Wednesday afternoon arrived and they loaded into the mini bus, babbling and giggling, dolled to the nines in their Sunday Best, I only saw a speck of what was to come. For, as their dusty laboured feet landed on a bed of green, they raised a freedom anthem and they ran and ran- screaming, rolling around and playing games without ceasing. Women who had never had the space to run free were representing the freedom within their hearts.
I want this freedom to be my daily language. Maybe we don’t dream because we don’t understand who He is enough. If we did we wouldn’t see limit. I want to understand the limitlessness of possibility that resides in Him. A possibility that screams ‘DREAM BIGGER MEGAN!.. AND DREAM BIGGER STILL.’ He wants to trade in small requests for audacious dreams, to beckon me beyond, just like when he beckoned Peter ‘come’,
I want to be Peter. I want to be the one who cries:
‘Lord, if it’s you, ‘tell me to come to you on the water.’
I want to dream with Jesus, and I want to walk on the water into my destiny with Him.
When we understand the beauty of the impossible, made possible within Him and through us, we won’t want to take our gaze off Him for a minute, and neither will we find reason to fear, the fear that stops us entering closer into the presence of the one who has just calmed the storm.
It is in understanding how great He is, that we have the freedom to understand just how great and powerful our own dreams can be.
It’s when we start dreaming, that God will lead us to deep waters. And,as we step out, we will see the storehouses burst a harvest tide, for abundance is here and now. Many of our dreams aren’t for a future date, to jot in the diary or sweat about. Dreams are from and of the dream-giver and they can be fulfilled today. We’re made to know more than the longing of our desires and dreams, we were made to taste and to physically step out and walk in them. And what better way to give praise back to the one who gave us the ability to dream than proving His worth and might through the way we dream.
And yes Peter sank. but he walked on water first. *HE WALKED ON WATER*. Average, mediocre Peter, fish-catching Peter walked on water! That’s as impossible as flying right?
We must ask to see how big He is again so we can be restored to dream. God is not us, we so often try and bring Him on our level. You are not exempt from God doing the limitlessly impossible with you. He wants to share dreams with you and the secrets of the kingdom. When did we start thinking His joy was seasonal and His favour partial. When did we start thinking God only gave himself to us in part, when in fact God is always pouring, always giving, we just don’t become the vessels in which to carry his goodness.
He has put this heart inside of each of us. Dreaming a dream over us in our very moment of conception beyond any dream that our own minds have ever conceived. An unleashed chamber of creativity and offering. A chamber that we hide for fear of what it feels to be vulnerable, for fear of the unknown, for fear of our own lack, for fear of Him exposing us, being embarrassed, being afraid of how to ‘look humble ‘or ‘act humble’. We see someone else’s dream and we believe we’re exempt or we ride on their passion. It wasn’t a place of knowledge and holding it all together that got Peter out of the boat, it was fear and vulnerability.
We don’t need to be realistic or rational about things because we don’t have a realistic or rational God.
Take off your shoes he whispers and reach out your hand. All along we’ve been walking on holy ground, we’ve just rarely known it away from the comfort of protected feet.
& when I think i’m there, his reply: wilder still, child, wilder still.