You Didn't Make It Up. You Just Survived It.

Hey, my friends. Welcome to Dream Again. Your comeback starts now. Guys, I'm a show you my story, and I'm a show you share it with you 12 stages, for the next twelve weeks where I'm gonna help you dream again and help you on your comeback. Let's go. Because your comeback starts now.

Before it broke, it was real. I mean, I need you to hear that before I say anything else today. The marriage, the ministry, the business, the version of your life, you could clearly see that you planned around, you told people about, you brought you bought things for, you made decisions you can't undo because you were so sure it was coming. And then it didn't come. And somewhere in the wreckage, a thought moved in and you and it never left. Maybe I made the whole thing up, and you didn't make it up.

You just survived it. Welcome to week one. Over the next twelve weeks, I'm gonna walk through the Dream Again method, seven stages, then the five daily commitments that hold it all together. This is just for you. This has been born out of my life, out of my comeback. Every comeback follows the same pattern.

All throughout scripture, Joseph lived it. I lived it. And if you're holding pieces in hand right now, you're living it too. You don't have to have a map yet. You don't need to have a blueprint yet. But today is stage one, dream.

And stage one is not what most people think it is. Most people meet on a stage and assume or meet me on a stage and assume, man, he's got it all figured out. This is all he ever wanted, but I didn't want any of this. I didn't wanna be on social media. I didn't wanna talk to people. I don't wanna be a pastor.

I didn't wanna communicate with people. Standing in front of people was the last thing I ever wanted to do. It was the biggest fear, the one fear that I had. I was a shy kid. I was the one in the back that never raised his hand. I'm the one that would disappear into a full room, and that's exactly how I wanted it.

I was so shy that when I went to bible college at 18, girls on the campus thought I was from a foreign country. They didn't think I spoke English. They thought I was a foreign exchange student, And they genuinely believed I couldn't speak English because I just would never talk. In speech class, man, I could barely get five words out. I remember thinking, how do you speak for ten minutes long without looking at something? What if your mind goes blank?

How do people do that? And so that's the guy that God called. Now here's how it happened. I was 18. A chiropractor took me on a basketball missions trip to Managua, Nicaragua. I didn't have any money for it.

He paid for the whole thing, and the setup was simple. During the day, we taught kids how to play basketball for for, like, a whole week. During the day, we teach basketball. At night, we would have a church service. And at night, they were holding a service, and one of my friends that's supposed speak and minister got sick. And they turned to me and said, hey, bro.

You go to bible college. We need you to speak. We don't have anyone else. And sit with that for just a second. The single thing that I feared most on planet Earth with no warning, no exit, just you're all we have. So I got up in front of about a 150 kids.

This is tin roof, hot. I mean, you're sweating through your shirt. I don't even remember what I said, honestly. I have no idea. I just know there's electricity in the room. I know the kids went crazy.

I don't even know what happened. And then the next morning, this is the part that completely rearranged my life. The chiropractor pulled me aside and said, Eric, what I saw you speak last night, God gave me two words from scripture just for you, and he read them to me. And I can't explain what happened next except to say it felt like I was standing in front of concert speakers. You ever been to a concert, and when they hit the bass, the waves just go into your body? Or if you heard a gong, it's like the reverberation of the the waves are floating through the air, they hit you.

That's how it felt. It was going through my chest, through my legs, through my hands. It was 08:00 in the morning. I didn't wanna be up. I was tired. I was half asleep.

And all at once, I was wide awake because God was moving through me in a physical force. And I didn't hear an audible voice. I just knew on the inside that God had something for me, that God was calling me, and I thought it was basketball. I really did. I figured, okay. God, you must want me to go play overseas like all my friends are, and I'll use basketball as a platform for you.

That was my idea. That was my best idea at 18 because being a pastor or a conference speaker or standing in front of people or leading a church, that wasn't even on the list. Not at all. I had no category for what was actually coming. Two years before that, I remember at 16, I'd already said, yes to the Lord. I remember being in chapel at Victory Christian High School in total Tulsa, Oklahoma.

We had this amazing move of the Holy Spirit. I just remember he's saying, god, I'll do whatever you want. I surrender to you because I have no idea what you want me to do. I have no idea what my plan is. I don't even know what I want. I'll just do whatever you say to do, whatever you want me to do.

That's what I would do. And I didn't know whatever would turn out to be the one thing on Earth that was the most terrifying for me in my whole life. And people assume the fear lifted after that, that god called me, and it took shyness away as a signing bonus. It didn't. I stood up in front of people for years, even still to today, it feels like you're still checking into the basketball game. You got the the jitteries.

You got the you got the warm fuzzies. I mean, it's nerve wracking, and there's nervousness, and you feel like you're gonna be sick. Fear didn't leave. The calling just got louder than the fear. And that's the whole mechanism. God doesn't remove the fear.

He makes the calling bigger than fear. And you find out you can walk while you're afraid, which is the one kind of walking most of us will do for the rest of our life, walking even when you're afraid. Here's why I'm telling you this about being a terrified 18 year old in Managua, Nicaragua instead of the years later when everything fell apart. I want you to know this, and this is super important. The dream did not start with me. I didn't invent the dream.

I didn't come up with the dream. The dream did not start with me. I didn't sit down one afternoon and draw up a life that I didn't want, I wasn't qualified for, that I was actively afraid of, and it came anyways because it was never my idea in the very first place. Which means when it it broke twenty something years later, it didn't break because I stopped believing in it, and that changed everything about stage one. See, I want you to hear me on this. Let me say the thing that you came to hear.

It's why you're here sitting and watching this. The fact that it broke does not mean it wasn't real. See, we do this thing to ourselves. Something collapses. Instead of grieving the loss, we go back and reinterpret the whole thing. Oh, I must have been naive.

I was arrogant. I heard wrong. That was never God. That was just me wanting something. See, that's not humility. That is pain inventing your theology.

Okay? Joseph was 17 when he had the dream. He was 17, and he had a dream of sheaves of grain bowing to him, the sun, the moon, and the 11 stars bowing to him, a teenager, with a download about his future. And he did exactly what every 17 year old did when he heard it. He told everybody, and it got him thrown into a pit by his own brothers, stole the strangers, lied about, and locked up. So was the dream real?

Joseph's dream was from God. The dream that God has given you is from God. And it took him twenty two years and a whole lot of suffering be before it became true. See, the pit hear me. The pit didn't cancel the dream. The prison didn't cancel the dream.

Being forgotten by a man who promised to remember him didn't cancel the dream. The dream was real the entire time. It just wasn't finished. See, you're not a fool for believing in the dream that God gave you. You're somebody whose story got interpreted in the See, you gotta hear me. Your original dream may have died, but the seed of it did not.

And I wanna be very careful, and I want you to listen because I'm not gonna stand here and promise you that that you're gonna get the same thing back. That's not what this is. Sometimes the exact thing that is gone is gone, and it's not coming back. And anybody who tells you otherwise is trying to just sell you stuff. But the seed that God gave, the dream that he gave you is still in the ground. And the calling underneath the job, the purpose underneath the title, the thing that God actually put in you underneath the container it happened to be poured into, maybe the container broke, but containers do that.

They break. And God listen to me. God not waste ruins. He rebuilds with them. So help let me help you make this practical because the seed versus the container sounds like a nice phrase. I love these phrases we we use in church, these cliches.

The seed versus the container Sounds like a nice phrase until you try to use it on a Tuesday. See, the container is the company. The seed is a problem you were built to solve. The container is the title on the door, but the seed is the gift that got you the door. The container is this is the specific marriage, but the seed is the kind of person you were becoming inside of it. So I'm separating the assignment from the address because most of us fuse them together as I did for twenty something years.

My sense of who I was, the position I had were the same object, and I could not have told you where one stopped and where the other began. So when the position went of pastor and it went fast or husband and it went fast, the first question that came to my mind or came up out of me was, what do I do now? What do I do? Who am I without the title? See, I'm gonna tell you the whole collapse next week, but today, all you need is the one question because this is the question that stage one exists to answer, and it has an answer. You just don't find it by getting the title back.

You find it underneath, down at the thing that god put in a shy kid who had no interest in any of this. The address changed. The assignment didn't. Now every stage has a lie attached to it. And if you can name the lie, you can stop obeying it. The lie of the stage one is not you failed.

The lie of stage one is, did God ever really speak to you in the first place? So you gotta understand the strategy. The enemy doesn't just want your circumstances. Circumstances are cheap. He can take the house, the title, the marriage, the money, and you still get up. And as long as you remember what God said, so he goes after the memory.

He doesn't just want to destroy what you built. He wants you to forget that God ever spoke to you. Because a person who remembers what God said is dangerous in a pit, but a person who has forgotten is just a person in a hole. That's why the first stage of the method is not action. It's not strategy. It's not a five year plan.

It's remembering. Not nostalgia sitting in the the wreckage with the photo album, letting the past heard on a loop, go on and on with regret. And regret says, this is what I lost. And remembering saying no. Remembering is saying to yourself, wait a minute. This is what God said to me.

And those are two different rooms. Here's what it sounds like out loud. God, before any of this happened, what did you put inside of me? That's the dream that God spoke to you. Do you remember? Not what did I build, not what did I lose.

What did you put in me? And when people actually sit with that question, they get quiet, and they get uncomfortable. And then almost every time, something surfaces that they haven't said out loud in years. But then that surfaces, that's the seed, and it's inside you. And that is what we're gonna build on. So what do you do with it?

See, you can't rebuild what you refuse to name. Let me say that again. You cannot rebuild what you refuse to name, and most people won't name it. And that and I know exactly why because naming it out loud makes it real again. And if it's real again, it can hurt again. So we keep it vague.

We keep it small. We say things like, I just don't wanna be I just wanna be at peace. I just want stability. See, stable is not a dream. Stable is a floor. And I'm asking you for the one thing, the specific thing, one thing that god spoke to your heart that made it beat fast when nobody was watching.

You need to say it out loud, and then you need to write it down even if it feels foolish, even if you think the window is closed, even if you can bet just wealth, convince yourself, man, you're disqualified. You're too far gone. No. You can name it. You need to put it on paper. What did god say to you?

That's the first brick. Now let me deal with the object because I can hear I can hear it now. Erik, I know. Erik, I disqualified myself. See, somebody's watching this didn't lose the dream of betrayal or the dream to a layoff, a dream to betrayal. You lost this to something you did.

And every time you get to the memory of what god said, what you did shows up right behind it. Right? And the two cancel each other out, and then you go back to sleep. See, some of you didn't lose the dream. You feel like you forfeited it. So hear me carefully.

Disqualification is a human system. God has never once used it on you or on people. See, go look at who he builds with. If you go throughout scripture, look who God builds with. A murderer leads the nation out. Moses was a murderer.

A man who denied Jesus three times preaches the first sermon of the church. A man who hunted believers first writes most of the New Testament. Not one of them was clean. Every one of them was called after. See, if god only worked with people who never blew it, the Bible would just be a pamphlet. Now I'm not telling you that consequences aren't real.

They are I've paid some, and you might be paying for some right now. And I'm telling you consequences and callings are two different accounts, and God does not close the second one to settle the first. So write it down anyways. What is the dream? What did God say to you? I'm serious.

Get a piece of paper. Go get it now. Not a note in your head, not a prayer you mumbled in the car, but paper. It's in your head. It's a feeling. On paper, it's real.

It's something you can build on. And that's the whole action step for this week. One sentence, handwritten if you can. The dream that God put in me before everything fell apart was that's it. Write it. That's stage one.

Write out the dream. You don't need a plan yet. You don't need to know how. You don't just you don't need to you don't start you need to stop pretending he never said it. Stop pretending what he said to you was true. And here's what I've watched people actually do.

They write a sentence explaining it or ex I'm sorry. They write the sentence expecting to feel foolish, but then they write it down. Something changes. The room changes. The vibe changes. Because however long it's been, a year, five years, twenty years, the thing that's been living in the bark where shame is set to guard.

The second is on paper, shame loses its job again. It's like, bye, shame. Because you can't argue with the sentence that you can see, and the sentence you're writing down is what god said to you. So if you need help writing it, if you need help getting it on paper and the sentence will come, that's what I have. It's free reset guide for. It's free.

Stage one has a question, and that question pulls a sentence out of you. Comment the word reset, r e s e t, and I'll send it to you, and I'll say it again at the end. But here's the verse we're building this week on. Jeremiah twenty nine eleven. No. I've never heard this.

I've heard this. Jeremiah twenty nine eleven. For I know the plans I have for you. I know the plans, declares the Lord. Plans to prosper you, not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future. Now that's a great verse.

It's on all my coffee mugs. It's on T shirts, and let me tell you where it wasn't written or who it wasn't written to. This was written to people in exile, not to people great year. This was written to a nation that was conquered. This was written to people that up that were uprooted and marched off to Babylon. People who had lost the temple, the city, the land, they've lost everything.

Everything that told them who they were, they lost. And then God speaks, I know the plans to people who have just watched their plans burn. See, that's the whole weight of it. God says, I know the plans to people standing in the ashes of their own. He didn't say, hey. I had plans, past tense.

He didn't say, hey. I'll come up with something else. He said, I know the plans I have for you. Present tense. Plans to prosper you, not harm you, to give you a hope, and a future. All present tense right now while you're sitting in the asking if if it was real, you lost your plan, but you didn't lose his plan.

Plans to give you hope. He plans his plans that give you a future. A future means there's more coming. There's more coming, which makes where you stand today a location, not a destination. The pit was never a permanent address. Never.

And notice what god doesn't do. He doesn't explain. He doesn't hand them a timeline. He gives them one thing to hold on. I know, and I still know. That's usually all you get in that's all you get in stage one, and it's enough to start because you're not being asked to see the whole thing today.

Joseph never got the middle explained to him. He only got the end. And by the time he could stand in front of his brothers who sold him Right? Can you imagine what that was like when Joseph was standing there in front of his brothers? Don't stand in the rubble demanding an explanation as the price of moving forward. You will not get it today, and waiting for it is how people spend years standing still.

It's time to move forward. Don't quit. Don't give up. It's time to dream again. Take this from the line. I know the plans I have for you.

Then go right yours down. So here's the move we're gonna make this this one move this week. Go get the free reset guide. It walks through all the seven stages, the dream, the break, the renew, the restore, the rebuild, the arise, and dream again. Every stage has a scripture, has an honest question, and one action step. Stage one action step is the one I just gave you.

Write the dream down. What did God say to you like he spoke to me when I was 18? What has he said to you? Write the dream down. Go get the guide. Click on the link in the bio, r e s e t in the comments.

It's free. It's the field manual. I wish somebody had handed me. Go get it. Go grab it.

And one more thing before I go. If I stirred something up in you, if a name or a picture of a life came back into your head while I was talking, that wasn't an accident. That's the seed. Your story is not over. Hey.

I'll see you next week for stage two. Break. It's time to dream again. Amen. Let's go.