On a quest to navigate what constitutes a flourishing life, one should expect to find numerous resources related to success stories from the athletic world to the business realm; however, one surprise on this journey has been the number of authors who recommend not only considering a strategic plan for how to accomplish one’s goals, but to think even larger to dream with Audacious Imaginations. From Smith coining this phrase in Live 10 to Batterson encouraging us to chase lions, people are being challenged to not place a human-sized measure of success onto a God-ordained opportunity to flourish.

Within me there exists the knowledge that God can do so much more than I could ever dream (that may actually be a song lyric), but rarely do I come to a deep awareness that God is really cheering for me, like a soccer mom on the sidelines at the West Jackson fields on fall Saturday mornings. It stretches my imagination to visualize God sitting in a chair in A-20A shouting encouragements such as, “You got this, Julie! You can find a fun way to teach students about proteins!” or “Way to go! You found the ideal word for that sentence in the blog!” Somehow, it just doesn’t compute! However, as Smith shares in Live 10, “I believe God is desperate to cheer us to our futures. He is the ultimate witness to our lives. He is our primary audience, and He wants us to hear Him shouting our names. He wants your God-inspired dreams to come true. He wants you to help make His world all He knows it can be. He is for you. Cheering for you.”

If we focus on the Audience of One, Smith believes that we can create what he calls a “preferred future,” but in order to accomplish this future, it is a prerequisite that we have Audacious Imaginations. Smith continues by proposing that we establish a new spiritual discipline, “the discipline of imagining. We must be intentional about imagining— deliberately and prayerfully imagining the specific things we believe God has said are possible for us.” What Smith describes as Audacious Imaginations does not come without limits and context. “When we imagine outside that context, audacious imagining can become a negative practice. Audacity can be positive or negative, bold or overconfident, brave or brazen, fearless or shameless, lionhearted or harebrained, valorous or heedless, adventuresome or reckless. We must exercise positive audacity within the framework of what God has destined our lives to be about.”

Encouraged by Smith’s concept of a preferred future, I would encourage all of us, especially emerging adults, to develop a Habit of Awareness. ‘To build the infrastructure necessary for success, we have to pray, to know God and ourselves, learn to lead ourselves, expand our knowledge about things beyond ourselves, keep doing the right things regardless of results, and have a proper understanding of success. Nobody wakes up and is a deep person. You must work hard to become aware of your blind spots and minimize your weaknesses.”

Not only does Smith encourage us to have Audacious Imaginations, but he mirrors the research of others shared in this blog, when he emboldens us to accept the Gift of Failure and develop resilience in our personal and professional journeys. “Keep doing the fundamentally right things regardless of whether they immediately pay off. There’s a lot to be said about getting up every day and doing these things until at some point over time, we experience a victorious result. Great dreams, ideas, and futures don’t happen overnight; they manifest through perseverance.”

As a person who is currently in the heart of her Season of life, it becomes a challenge for me to consider what dreams God still has for me that I cannot even begin to imagine. Because my life has a consistent but imperfect rhythm to it, dreaming audaciously does not come as easily as it did in my 20s. However, if I am willing to follow my own advice and that of wise Christians, “part of being successful is sticking around long enough, doing the right things again and again, and nurturing a life environment that allows God, who makes things grow (2 Cor. 3:6), to show up and make dreams come true. We must persevere!”

Do you have an Audacious Imagination? Would you be vulnerable and share in the comments below? Or perhaps, you had a dream that seemed audacious at one time, but God was faithful to answer your prayers.

References:

Batterson, M. (2016). Chase the lion: If your dream doesn’t scare you, it’s too small. Multnomah.

Smith, T.A. (2013). Live 10: Jump-start the best version of your life. Thomas Nelson.