My future has always been a daunting, consuming thought to me. For as long as I can remember I have dreamt big dreams and I have held myself to the highest standards. I fear failure and I get frustrated when I do not excel at any given task. My futures scares me. My future holds endless possibilities; possibilities to either succeed or fail. Because of this, I have always obsessed over my future, attempting to control it in any and every way that I could, paving my way towards success.
Then I signed up for The World Race.
In every logical way, this went against my all of my future plans. My biggest dreams are to become a pediatrician and a mom of a large, loving family. School has always been my top priority as it is what I need to achieve these dreams, yet here I am seven months into a whole year off from school.
That is because God is control of my future, not me.
While I was stressing over timing and all the logistics of how I can accomplish what I want, God was thinking of my values and using those to shape His vision for my life. These are the principles I have learned this week: values, vision, and how they shape my future. I learned that my future is not meant to stress me out or terrify me. Rather, my future is full of hope and great achievements.
“Where there is no vision the people cast off restraint, but blessed is he who keeps the law.” (Proverbs 29:18)
Creating a vision for myself took away a lot of the intimidation in the word “future.” I sat down with God and spent some time thinking about all of my biggest dreams and the things that are truly important to me. I looked for themes in all of these dreams and condensed them into a fulfilling vision I can live by.
Here is the vision I created for my personal life:
My ultimate vision for life is to love others with all that I have, specifically children. I will bring this into my future with a large, loving family. I also aspire to take this into my career as I become a pediatrician and provide healthcare for children. Additionally, I desire to provide love and support for kids living in poverty, by expanding my profession to provide free healthcare to impoverished families in both my own community and around the world. In all of this, I aim to be rooted in a faith in God that cannot be shaken.
Now, I had a clear and concise idea of what I truly desire for my future. I could picture this vision for my life and I was eager to start living for it. But achieving that is a ways away. I began to fear how I would live out this vision in my day to day life for all the years it would take to get there. Then, I learned the principle of values.
I discovered that as long as my values align with my vision and I know what they are, I can function off of my internal compass that is my values. By living my life in accordance with my values, I would inevitable be working towards my vision. So, I asked myself, “What are my values? Do they align with my vision?”
I discovered these to be my top five values in life:
- Love
- Family
- Trust
- Equality
- Respect
My values will lead me to fulfilling my vision. By knowing my values, I can confidently make decisions each day that I know will ultimately help me in my vision because the roots of my values take me to my vision.
Finally, I consolidated all of these things into a life path. I determined where I am now and where I want to be and I wrote those down. Between the two of these was the path that is my life. On this path, I will learn things and have to adjust, I will face ups and downs, but I will never stray too far to stay on track because I can see where I want to be.
This eliminated almost all of my fear of the once intimidating word “future.” I now know where I want to go in life and I know as long as I continue living out of my values, I will stay on the right path moving towards that vision. I am able to see where I am, where I want to be, and how I am going to get there. If I ever lose sight of that, I simply have to reread this vision statement I discovered and reexamine the things I know I value and remind myself to live them out.
