DOUBT

You know, I’ve found that doubt kills more dreams than any person or temporary road block ever could. Doubt is an imprisonment we accept willingly for ourselves if we aren’t aware and centered in truth. I’ve always been a big dreamer. I am classically trained in ballet and tap, and started dancing when I was very young, up until my senior year of high school. I was convinced that I was going to own my own dance studio some day! If that dream fell through, I thought, well duh, I’ll just become the next Oprah Winfrey, no big deal. I knew that I would totally rock out leading my very own book club and obviously would enjoy every moment creating the awesome list of my favorite things that I would gift to the people every year. It would be amazing! What’s the career you always wanted as a child? Can you remember? Are you working in that field today? Are volunteering in that field to continue to gain experience? What are you passionate about? Maybe it’s not about the career for you. Maybe it’s about taking risk. What about the city or country you always said you wanted to travel to, or live even? Can you remember it?

Along the way, getting into the best college, maybe providing for a new family, working a 9-5 like the rest of the adulting citizens in our country, completely shifted our experience. Well, my experience at least. Let’s just go after the obvious question, Did I ever open that dance studio? Nope. Am I Oprah Winfrey’s prodigy? Jury’s still out. LOL. You get my point. My dreams too, have been placed on the lonely back burner. But my point in all of this is, there are still dreams to be had and goals to be accomplished.  How can we motivate ourselves to create new dreams and complete new goals? Our lives have essentially “just started”, and everyone is quick to remind us of that, so what’s stopping us? There’s that word again, doubt.

If you’re anything like me, there have been these questions that you have begun asking yourself. Who am I becoming? Where is my life going? Will I work in this job forever? Do I want to get married someday? Am I really going to do that whole push a baby out thing? If I double up on my car payment can I still afford to travel… Okay maybe that last one is just for me. But these questions about my future are reoccurring. Maybe you’re having similar questions come to you.  I like to think of them as “growing questions”. Everything about a twenty to thirty somethings life, is growing, changing and sowing. We are becoming ourselves more and more as the days go on. Why not choose this season of our lives to cast out any remnant of doubt lingering its way into 2017 with us?

Analyze your circle, who builds you up? Who speaks life into you? Can you name five peers in your life right now, who will pray for you in the time of need? I mean out loud, fervent prayer. Okay, three? Here’s the thing, can you speak life over yourself? Can you build up a confidence within yourself? At the end of the day, you will never fail you, and people are human, so they will fall short of our expectations. But when you’ve grown and worked through the doubt that you may have within yourself, you began to source all fulfillment, confidence and truth from the only source that matters. I’ve continually had to remind myself to stop seeking life from dead places. There are dead people walking daily. Hear me out, walking in dead dreams, dead motivations and dead hopes that keep them crippled in the past, while living through the motions in the present. You’ve got to source life from within. It’s precious.

When you accept the truth that we are built and called to live life abundantly, it makes it hard to accept walking through life in motions. Wake up, work, sleep, repeat. NO! I wasn’t built for that. I am built for risk, exhilarating conversations and experiences, international travel, and the list goes on and on. Your list is just as rich and full, I’m sure! The fullness of life is awaiting us and it starts with making choices. You must begin to empower yourself, to answer the growing questions that have visited you. Answer them, write it down, and make it plain. Who am I? I am, blah blah blah. Where is my life going? My life is going in this direction….. my dreams include…. And my goals for this season of my life are blah, blah, blah. Write it down, put it somewhere, where you can see it every, single, day. I know some of you are like, Kasai it’s not that serious, I don’t need to hang it up, and what if people come over and see my lists, they are going to think I’m crazy. My response to that is, why are you having company in your home, that you don’t trust with your goals and aspirations in the first place? Ijs. Moving along…

I am an advocate for journaling as well. Even for small children. If they can color in a coloring book, or even write their name, it’s time a for a journal. We all need a place for our thoughts and ideas. I use my notes app on my iPhone daily. It’s a great way to write some creative insights on the go. When we start answering these questions, we begin the work. Set goals so that you can begin becoming and doing the things you feel you are called to do. Don’t make the mistake of setting milestones. You’ll only disappoint yourself in the end. Instead make small goals that will lead to milestones. This way, there will be constant satisfaction of accomplishment along the way. January 1st, 2017. It’s a great day, to have a great day. It’s an even better day to start writing down your goals and dreams for this season of your life, and making them plain. I am wishing you, your family and our entire world an abundant, fulfilling New Year. We’re headed to Passion 2017, and ready to start this first week of the year with a HUGE bang! Stay tuned for an inside look at the 2017 Passion conference! I am excited to share some moments with you all.

Kasai

Psalm 37:11 But the meek shall inherit the land and delight themselves in abundant peace

John 10:10 I came that they may have life and have it more abundantly

GRATEFULNESS

Kent State University, Clark Hall 2nd floor. What did I expect? I knew that I hadn’t been pushing myself to my fullest potential academically. I knew that partying and dating had consumed every aspect of my attention span. I sat in one of the private bathroom stalls in the all-girls bathroom on my floor, steps away from my dorm room, crying so hard that my head hurt. I made myself sick and begun to completely panic. How could I face my family? How could I let this happen? I had just received notice that I had been placed on academic probation and was being threatened with expulsion from the university. Depression, excessive amounts of alcohol and partying had everything to do with it, but the main contributing factor was my inability to see myself for who I truly was.  My perspective of who I was shifted at a very young age. The painful devastation of the results of my parent’s divorce, led to inconsistencies in my relationship with my father. My heart was infiltrated with the lies of insignificance, that would haunt me for years. I carried this belief of insignificance with me to Kent State, and in that moment in the bathroom, my academics revealed just how little I thought of myself and my abilities to succeed.

All I could think about was what I was lacking. Everything about me that I hated, and everyone that hated me. I couldn’t stop thinking about all the reactions people would have if I had to leave school and move back home with my mom in Columbus, Ohio. My mind was racing and I had to decide what I was going to do… face it all, or escape? I contemplated suicide that day, to be honest it was all entirely too much for me to handle. I thought out a plan, even sat down to write the letter. I had thought that I had made my mind up. If I was going to be kicked out of college, and shame my family in that way, I was positive in that moment that the ridicule and judgement of others would be too much for me to face. I couldn’t take the, “I told you she’d never be nothing” possibility. In those moments in that bathroom, I couldn’t see myself. I couldn’t see through the dark forest of lies, that there was a path leading me towards the woman that I was destined to become someday. However, the worse part about it was that I couldn’t see how much I was drastically selling myself short. When someone is struggling with sadness, they are struggling with not only their thoughts, but also their perspective. Little did I know, if you begin to change your perspective, you will begin to change your life. This situation with my grades and Kent State University pushed me to make a choice. A choice that shifted the entire perspective of my life, towards gratefulness.

Have you ever heard the quote, “Happiness is a choice”? What are your thoughts on that? For so long, I thought “I wish people would shut up!” when they said that to me. I thought, “I can’t choose to be happy, because I’ve had all of this stuff happen to me and I am not happy about it- AT ALL!” Today, I want to flip that quote and say to you that, “Gratefulness is a choice.” In that bathroom at Kent State, I was grateful at that capacity, for the first time, in a long time. How can you be grateful and borderline suicidal? Well, the overwhelming sadness of leaving Kent State, revealed my true heart for it. It revealed my deeply rooted desire to continue to pursue my education as well. The devastation of leaving revealed my admiration towards staying. I felt the preview of the loss I would experience if I had to let Kent State and my college career go. That feeling of loss, brought about my perspective of gratefulness to be there.

Use your devastation, to impact your admiration. Haven’t you heard the saying, “You don’t know what you’ve got til it’s gone”? THIS IS SO TRUE! To walk in gratefulness, you must change your perspective from focusing on what you lack, to focusing on what you have. It’s a requirement to experience the fullness of gratefulness. I could provide "The Ultimate List" of all the steps I took from that moment in that bathroom, to earning my degree at Kent State University in 2014, but that’s not the point here. That wouldn’t truly serve any of you. Instead I say this, when you begin to position your heart in gratefulness, joy will ALWAYS follow.

Grateful people aren’t always rich and have it all together, but grateful people are rich in love and know it will all come together. I chose to use gratefulness to my advantage. I decided to clean and respect my dorm room. I began to remove myself from relationships with people who simply didn’t serve my life. Now don’t go ending relationships because you’ve “been called to” after reading this post. Instead just reevaluate, and become more present in your interactions with your friends and family. How does interacting with them make you feel? Are these relationships healthy for you and where your life is going? For me during that time in my life, the idol, that is the approval of man, had always been something I struggled with. I wanted everyone to like me and approve of me, so I used to just hold onto friendships and romantic relationships just to feel the approval of it all. Through growth and the maturation of my relationship with Jesus, I embraced the truth, that the only approval and validation I needed was rooted in Christ’s death on the cross. Not everyone is called to be a character in your book. My mom always told me this. I’ve grown and experienced along the way, but I choose daily to be grateful and not broken in what I lack. I have chosen to accept the blessings that came into my life as well.  I have been so blessed to receive the love of my step- father, and the group of beautiful, life-long friends I made in my latter years at Kent State University. My perspective of gratefulness has led me to a broken heart for the world, instead of a broken heart for myself and my past. I choose to sponsor a child in need, instead of focusing on my own “needs”. As you’re reading this post, someone is enslaved in human trafficking. As you’re reading this post, someone is living daily in a country at war. As you’re reading this post, someone is homeless and starving. We are so incredibly blessed. Blessed beyond measure, meaning that there is not metric system out there, that can begin to quantify how amazingly blessed we are. How immeasurably blessed you are. I choose gratefulness when things go wrong, where I used to choose anxiety and sadness. I encourage you to choose gratefulness if you are struggling with something in your life right now. How? How can I do this? Well, get yourself a journal. Head to the Dollar Tree if you’re ballin’ on a budget.

Once you have your journal, it’s time to begin the work. Each day, you are responsible to write at least 3-5 things you are grateful for. Sounds easy? You’ll see! The goal is to try not to repeat. This exercise has contributed to the healing experience in my life. When you fill your journal, you will feel so incredibly full and blessed, and that’s because you are. You are extremely blessed. Focus on what you have, and forget about everything you believe you lack. Happiness may be a choice, but I know for a fact that Gratefulness is a choice for certain. Gratefulness is something you can choose to work on today, right now in this moment.

This scripture in Matthew continues to increase my awareness of how God continues to provide for us. How we can leave the worry of what we lack in the past and move forward

Kasai Marie

Matthew 6:25-30 New International Version (NIV)

25 “Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothes? 26 Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? 27 Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life[a]?