HOW TO REACH YOUR DREAM

MEANS TO REACHING YOUR DREAM

BY: EDOKA PETER-PAUL

According to TD Jakes, “God never gave you a dream for you to do it. God gave you a dream so you can watch it. So you can stand and watch Him unfold His miraculous supernatural powers”.

God has given you the dream, and He will not take it back from you, unless you will it. All He ask you to do is to watch Him as He will be using His power to make the dream a reality. All you should do is identify with the means of reaching your dream. Let us go through some means of how to make your dream a reality.

Repentance: In the first chapter of the book of Prophet Isaiah, at the fifteenth verse God said, “When you lift your hands in prayer, I will not look at you. No matter how much you pray, I will not listen, for your hands are covered with blood.” While at the sixteenth verse, the book says, “Wash yourselves clean. Stop all this evil that I see you doing ....”

Sin is the only thing that is capable of stopping you from reaching your dream. Even when you know your dream and you can feel it with your hands; you will not be able to get hold of it because of your sins. And since no one can claim that s/he has no sin, repentance is now a necessary element that you will need to seek, in sincerity, so as to reach your dream.

Repentance must accompany some certain sacrifices and amendments of life-style. Fasting, prayer and arms-giving has been proven to be a sure means to appeal to God for mercy and grace and a total turnaround from evil to good, from failure to success. When you fast, your body goes through some amount of pains that remains you of why you are striving at repentance. And while you pray, you acknowledge the fact that you are helpless and needs only the help and grace and mercy of God upon your life. Arms-giving will then becomes like adding salt to soup elements on fire to bring out the best, delicious taste that is expected.

Sincere repentance is a strong resolution of not going back to your past and about taking a different route towards achieving your goal on earth. Ultimately too, sincere repentance is about continues striving to be closer to God and living each day in His presence and according to His directives and will.

Don’t be too confident about your righteousness that you will say you don’t have need to repent in order to reach your dream. Even if all the lights are green on your route to your dream, some prayers and fasting and sincere turn-around from past and evil will be a double-door opener.

Discovery: You might have known your talents and abilities and interests, but it is often advised that you strive to discover the things and means needed to authenticate the talents and abilities and interests.

Discovery about the knowledge of the processes involve in reaching and holding it in your hands. Now this process differs from individual to individual, from talent to talent. Every career has its own peculiarity in the path of reaching its zenith. A career in medicine would require studying science related subjects at elementary level of education and a particular field of medicine at the university level. But a career in writing would need, in addition to an exposed educational life, the ability to be a deep-thought individual who is in love with silence, with creative power and imagination as deep as the ocean. Writing gives you the ‘right’ to create ‘new’ things and generate novel ideas that would ultimately change the face of the world.

Discovering your talent and ability and what you do with ease and enjoy doing without keeping track of time or what is happening around you, is discovery your core self and mission on earth. Like writing this article in the Perpetual Adoration Chapel of St. Julius Catholic Church Agbado, without checking what time it is and not allowing the sound of the passing train and vehicles to distract me – I am enjoying writing this down and it makes me feel like I am talking with you now. Indeed I am!

Means To Succeed: This subtitle is rather broader to be just a subtitle, but however, I will throw some light into making it suitable here.

In the means of discovering yourself and your dream and talent, you should be getting insight on how to go about it, to succeeding in that which you so dare to do. The means to succeed largely differs from profession to profession, career to career, vocation to vocation. As a writer, I go about with pen (pencil) and note pad, because I get inspire by things that ordinarily would not mean anything to some persons. The way someone breaths might generate an idea in me that could be an article, quotation, poem, prose or even lyric.

Means to succeed is therefore things you do consciously towards achieving your set goal. This could be making a draft of ‘hows’ and ‘whens’ and ‘whos’; meaning, making lists of how to succeed in your sincere pursuit of success, when to take the next step towards success, and who to seek advice or assistance from. This simply means that in whatever you do, you must draw out a map; you must make a path through which you will guide your steps to reaching your ultimate and final destination.

Before the creation of Pillarious Foundation, without me even knowing it, God made me work with an entertainment company that also runs a Widows Empowerment Foundation. That means I was at a place where I could do some writing, listen and write songs, meet popular actors and musicians. And with the Foundation, I saw how one can develop an idea, perfect it and approach companies, organizations and individuals for support.

With all these, I was able to grasp the means to succeed at my career and how to brand my ideas and make them products for generating funds that must be used for the growth and development of the entire human race.

Commitment: Here goes the saying: There is dignity in labour. Unless you ‘work’ during the day, you don’t have need to rest at night. Have you ever been in a situation where you did nothing for the whole day, and when you retired to bed at night you felt so tired and worst still, you felt much more tired by the time you wake the next morning. I was there! Because one did not do anything during the day, the body could not take the rest that its need; therefore it leaves you feeling more tired.

Your body needs ‘work’ that it can be able to rest during the night. That is a clear indication that unless you are committed to your dream, unless you ‘work during the day’ you will not find rest when you sleep, you will not find success and fulfilment. You noticed how I put ‘work during the day’ in parenthesis; it means doing something for the cause of what you want to achieve – you must do something! Working during the day does not necessarily mean doing your work only during the day, it could be during the night too; but ultimately, it means you must do something.

The draft of this article was made between 2am and 4am. I was awoken by ideas from my sleep and I had to make draft of what I was having in my head. However, the developing of the draft was made at different times of the day. So, been committed to succeed is going out of your comfort zone to receive the ‘coking’ necessary for you to become what God wants you to be. It’s like when you desire to eat rice; the raw seed must be committed to water and heat before it becomes eatable.

How much commitment should I put you might ask. And I would answer; put as much commitment as the breath you get. If you can be committed to achieving your goal as often as you breathe, then you will succeed as soon as you start the race to reaching that ultimate goal.

Patience & Perseverance: Drip-drip f water can fill the ocean bed, just as an out pour of water from the sky. The only difference there is the times spend at the art of ‘filling’.

Your task here is, after repenting of your sins, discovering your path to greatness, knowing the means to achieving your success, and giving your total commitment to reaching your goal; you must apply little bit of patience and lots of perseverance. Things will definitely work at stopping you. Situations might not come out exactly the way you always wished. But understanding this will help you prepare for another option before hand and knowing that what is trying to stop you is only giving you deep insight at becoming successful and remaining successful; not been successful today and failing tomorrow.

You probably know the saying that: Rome was not built in a day. So, if you want your ideas to be relevant and live long even after you, you must be ready to exercise deep patience and strong perseverance. If you are not facing challenges at finding your path, then you are obviously treading the path which someone had made, and that means the idea you are holding on as yours and novel is not. Know that to be successful with your idea; it must be a novel one, with foundation on some existing ones

Your idea might be to improve on an existing idea created by someone. Or your idea might have to be 99% new, which has a very little part of it standing on other ideas. But in all these, you should experience challenges; because it’s like when a farmer enters a virgin land and prepares it for farming. You must prepare the land just the way you want it for your crops. You must make your path just the way you want to reach your success.

Just like we started, God gave you the dream at first place, so give Him the chance to make the dream come true by creating time for Him and by committing the idea you are getting to Him. Since writing of articles and quotations forms part of Pillarious Foundation, sitting in this Chapel, praying and writing my ideas out and getting more ideas is the best means to show God owns the dream.