Does the Dream that you feel you're created to pursue need to have a "Christian" aspect to it, to be valid?

Do you need to have an agenda as you go about pursuing your Dream - a goal to bring people to God through the work that you do - or can your work and your Dream simply be? No agenda, no goal.

At Impactivity, we always want to bring people back to their deeper WHY of living out the purpose God has for us, to partner with Him to love and serve other people.

At the same time, we encourage women to recognize that they must consider their own hearts, dreams, goals, and their physical, spiritual, emotional and relational health.

how do we bring these two together

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So how do these two purposes come together? And how do we balance this deeper purpose of kingdom-building with taking care of ourselves and producing our message, art, service, or product that has value for its own sake?

Being healthy and living a joy-filled, peace-filled life is part of what God offers us. Some of us come from backgrounds where that statement feels selfish.

Living out our purpose in the world as tools in the hands of the God who created us is also part of what God offers us. Some of us come from backgrounds where that statement feels like we're being asked to push our faith on other people.

Coming to a place in life where both of these truths can exist together is critical. They mix and blend in ways that can't be separated…

Taking care of our health, understanding how to embrace our individual gifts and thrive, and pursuing a joyful life causes us to love and serve others better.

And loving and serving causes us to feel joy and to thrive in the life we've been given.

But even without that intersection, both our purpose and our own joy have value.

Neither the approach of "I should be invisible and my life only be about God's work for me" nor the approach of "I am at the center and my priority is taking care of me" are the place that God has for us.

Some of us need to slow down with the work and remember that loving and serving people is the deeper reason behind it.

Some of us need to slow down with the serving of others and remember that taking care of ourselves is right and good.

Pursuing both the Dream that God has gifted us to pursue and a full life of health and joy is the best route to joy, and it's the best route to living out God's purpose for us.

So the question of which do I focus on… is both. Which is hard.

does it all need the christian stamp

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Does everything we create in the marketplace have to "look" Christian? Do we all need to have a fish on the logo? Do we have to publically declare ourselves as Christians in everything we do, and think of our work as simply a means to the spiritual end of pointing people to God, with no value in and of itself?

What do you think? Did the apostle Paul's tents have fish symbols embroidered on the side? Was the work that Jesus created with his hands in the family business only for synagogues? I think we can guess… probably not.

But let's go a step further… Did Paul make tents only so that he could spread the gospel? Did Jesus build stuff only so that he could get into people's homes and talk about God's kingdom? Or is there validity in simply doing work for its own sake, and to make an income and support yourself?

Perhaps it's time to get some freedom around the Dream that is building in your heart, especially if you've been shutting it down out of a fear that it wasn't "spiritual" enough.

All work is sacred, if it flows from our giftedness and is offered up to God to be used, or not used, in whatever way He sees fit. And the non-work parts of our life are sacred, too, because this is the life that God has given us to live.

If you're wondering about your own purpose, and trying to figure out how who you are intersects with who God wants you to be, you may find the dig deeper resource below, Dream Circles, to be helpful, as we walk you through a process to discover some answers.