"Dreams can come true, look at me babe I'm with you..."

That was what came on my car radio last night as I came back from Michelle's and I meant to mention it in my blog but I never. So now I have. If this whole God thing really has come together then absolutely anything actually is possible - there was a time I never thought He could be with me and now look: He is and I still can't get over it.

Which is the reason that I am slowly going from being a person who expected things never to work out to someone who is always expecting everything to. Moments of absolute disdain aside (which can take a large chunk out of some of my days, granted) I have been having loads of hope recently. Ridiculous amounts. Raising them stakes good and high. The way I see it, if God is gonna top anything I can conceive of then the best thing for me to do is think BIG. That's a boring game theory model. Think BIG get BIGGER. Think small get Medium. There is no payoff formula is there? I think the answer is "Duh, Supersize me".

So today I did. I dreamed SO big. I planned the next 30 years of my life. There were lots of gaps, don't get me wrong, and I am not saying this all has to happen or else, I just figured "why not get excited by the possibilities?" Some of it is crazy and made up and I won't be really disappointed if becoming Prime Minister doesn't happen (hell, I'm not entirely sure how I would feel about a woman running the country!) and exactly how Eastern Europe comes into it is flexible... but some of it I can see clearly in one shape or another. Like community building in Bristol, being a homemaker (not the same as housewife), working with the homeless, female identity empowerment (not "female empowerment" which sounds a lot like feminism and I don't mean at all), starting a music project that gives opportunity to the deprived and disadvantaged and shares love with the world. I even decided that I probably did need a husband at some point and now have a pretty good feel of what he would need to be up for and capable of!! They're not all bad after all...

So I was kinda stoked about this vision. It clearly isn't going to look exactly like this but I reckon that God is putting some stuff in particular on my heart. And I really do get that if His alternative is to be, say a stay home mum for example, then that would be the better thing.

At the same time I was aware it's important that, in my expecting of great stuff and amazing gifts, how God wants to use me is so not about me. Which is really really hard. I don't know about you but I have this huge imagination which is lots of fun and exciting and enables me to see the "bigger picture" but it also leads me to get carried away with things that are just "cool". The advance autobiography that I wrote for myself would have gotten well loads of credit I swear. I would be everybody's fave prime minister and change the world... whilst also fabulously managing a family of 4/5 and recording several albums. And what with my "childlike" faith that God can do it I am prime candidate for missing the point that He probably shouldn't. I struggle enough with pride (when I'm not struggling with feeling down on myself, obviously) indeed even as I write I am proud that I have recognised this danger in advance! I just can't win...

So I'm sitting at this concert tonight with my sister, contemplating all these important things in my young brain, when God starts stirring a bit more. The gig was amazing. A team of musicians that work with prisoners and ex-prisoners as a rehab type thingy - called changing tunes, check it out. Some of the most powerful songs I have ever heard, particularly one that just spelled out in incredible "The Streets" style this really gritty gripping reality of the unhealthy complicated status between men and women. It all just added to the realisation that music is an amazing tool with the capacity to change lives and bring light. Hurrah! Inspiring much? Coincidence? I knew that I wanted to work with homeless people and "disadvantaged" youth 'cause that's where I have been "moved" and where my albeit limited experiences lie, so the prison work was a really cool overlap but with plenty of scope to bring it to others.

'Cause of course that is my priority. Tapping a new market. Helping people that have no other options. Really making a BIG difference. Being something incredible that makes people go wow and gives a warm fuzzy glow at the *number* of lives changed. Getting my M.B.E.

So I have to laugh when at the interval one of the musicians gets up and talks about this new project that has been set up in the kinda funky-but-really-quite-dodge part of town where there is already a huge vision for change and love revolution. A vision I already feel both excited by and jealous of. The project described ticks in every way what I had just decided to call my life works.

I can't help it. I feel like I missed the window, not been there from the start. Now I'm trying to carve out a special role for me in The Kingdom but really I mean in The World 'cause that is the place that my accolade would be coming from. I arrived back in England to see the beginning of a radical church movement in Bristol, a revolution underway; and though I'd been praying and excited and certain of it happening before I got here I was kinda annoyed that no-one waited. There have been people praying for decades but I had claims on the particular power of mine and where is the recognition? No-one even knows I exist.

So what is this post about? Well, I figure seeing as I don't get to be a "founder" of the self-harmony (it even has a cool name) thing and will no doubt have to be a "worker" instead then the least I could do is put it somewhere in writing that I thought of it too... independently of them!

Lol. I figure this is kinda how we are, right? People. Crap. Yet not. But still so. It's funny, sometimes if I'm really quiet I think I can hear my sinful nature fighting with the Holy Spirit as though they were sitting on my shoulders.

I know, I always have I think since I resigned myself to Christ, that it isn't about me. That community is the best thing and that as I allow it to become important and the love takes over then I will believe in it increasingly, till one day I know it wholeheartedly in every circumstance. Just it sucks when you want to be a pop star! Or anything else.

We see it everywhere you know, taking ownership. Even in the church. Duh, particularly. Even when it is about what God is doing people love to be able to claim that He is doing it just for them, because of what they have been doing and how they have been seeking. Even when it is a community it is a limited community, just you and your friends. Even when it is the Christian world as a whole we forget that it isn't just for us but for EVERYONE and get comfy and superior.

So what will I do? Write my plan in pencil I suppose. Go where He wants. Trust that the timing isn't a fudge and that I will be put in the right place even if that place is somewhere really small - which presumably it will be when my humility is still so small. I think that humility and importance are directly proportional you know. He only lifts people up that don't care - which is why I'm trying so hard not to!

One thing I read that is really helpful for me in my motivations lately (I can spend a long time over-analysing things and getting very confused about what is actually going on in my heart) is something Paul wrote. It's funny, I used to really hate that guy but he does say some good shit:

I care very little if I am judged by you or by any human court; indeed, I do not even judge myself.

Which makes sense given how fickle and complicated we are.

So I will carry on dreaming and believing and seeking and petitioning what is on my heart to the best of my own understanding but there really is very little point in me trying to figure it all out, what with the constant internal battle. If God didn't put it in me then it won't last long, what with the victory having been won. I just have to let Him carry on changing me.

It does suck though. At the moment it still sucks... but I am a work in progress and the masterpiece is yet to be reveal...!