What do you do when things don’t go according to plan? When you have a dream, a call, a vision that doesn’t play out the way you thought it would. In this episode Gina’s and singer/songwriter Rheanna Downey. Have an honest conversation about dreams, disappointment, expectation, surrender, trust and identity.
You can learn more about Rheanna Downey and her music at rheannadowney.com
Stewarding Dreams
Gina:
We met almost two years ago, at the Living Loved events. You and I were part of the team that led worship for two cool events. One in San Diego, one in LA, with our dear friend, Roy Cochran and Justin Hoeppner and Norm, my husband.
We got to spend a couple of fun days together doing ministry, and we’ve got to lead and do different things here and there. But you live in Encinitas and I live in Orange County, so we don’t get to see each other a ton. But you’re one of those people that we met, and we’re instant friends. I like you a lot and I appreciate you.
I know you are a singer, songwriter, artist. You’re gifted in a lot of things, but also, you’re a leader, a spiritual leader. You’re prophetic. My friend Chris and I got to come to a little thing you had at your house the other night. It was fun for Chris and I to watch you.
The gentle authority that you have in the lives of these women and the impact that God has through you in their lives was cool to see. That evening you were sharing a little bit, it was the night you do yearly with a group of women. Why don’t you explain a little bit of that.
Rheanna:
It’s called a dream night. I’ve done it four years in a row. I didn’t start it with the intention of it being an annual thing, but it turned into that. it initially started off as, “Let’s get together. Let’s pray. Let’s do these vision boards.” Some people freaked out. They were like, “Is that like a New Age thing? I’m like, “No, it’s not. We’re not doing a New Age thing. We’re actually casting our vision with the Lord in a prophetic way.”
I think we left some space for it to be not completely defined. I always have a million ideas, but it turned into this beautiful night. People were getting words and to this day I still have people come up to me and say, “At your dream night, that set a course for my entire year. God spoke things over me that night. I saw things that night with God that just completely shifted the course of my life and in some pretty major ways.” I felt privileged to partner with God in that. It’s just one thing I do a year.
Gina:
It’s an encouragement for people. We can get locked, as believers, into feeling like our gifts need to fit into a church program where we can use our gifts. It’s hard for people, a lot of times, to consider that God can put something on your heart and you can invite people to your home and you can minister to people and pray for one another and see God do amazing things.
I think we, in the Western Evangelical world, we’ve gotten trapped by the four walls of whatever church community we belong to. Not that there’s anything wrong with those communities. They’re powerful and they’re significant, but what’s in you is not just to remain inside those four walls.
Rheanna:
On that point, we’ve gotten good at programs and filling the space up completely. I feel like with God, it’s important to keep a lot of space open. It’s the same thing about prayer and meditation. Prayer is us talking to God, prayer goes both ways, but meditation is us listening.
The Christian Evangelical world spends so much time talking, they can’t hear anything. Sorry, Evangelical World, but it just tends to be a thing. It’s disempowered the person.
We need to understand that every single person has a space that’s empowered by the Holy Spirit to open up and use our giftings with everybody else. I love the idea of doing things with Holy Spirit that doesn’t have a complete framework attached to it.
Gina:
That’s what spiritual community is: to be able to be set loose in that. But back to that night, you put out some questions and you shared a little bit about the last year for you and processing how you put it that night was almost the death of a dream. I would love for you to share a little bit of that story and that journey and how God met you there.
Because I see you every six months or so over the last two years. I’ve watched from a distance, your journey. I would say a good six to eight months ago, you were in a hard place and struggling a bit.
It was cool to be there that night and see that you’re in this place now where you’re seeing where God was in that. You’re seeing Him where He is now and the journey He’s been meeting you in.
Surrendering the Outcome of Our Plans
Rheanna:
You don’t never think that your real desires or dreams lie at the other end of the death of something. This last year was very difficult for me, on many fronts. I was dealing with a lot of depression, which was weird for me because I had depression when I was a teenager, I would have these rolling depressions, but this was a fog.
It wasn’t like, I was so sad. It was like, I just could not see through the clouds. I couldn’t make sense of anything. I felt completely unmotivated, felt like my creativity was dampened. For me, creativity is like a lifeline to God. It was tricky.
I would say that this season has been about God. I don’t want to go off on a tangent too much, but God was changing the way He’s speaking to me. I went from learning to hear His voice in this prophetic way, where I would hear something and I’d write it down. It was this beautiful time where I had that.
Then that shut down. God was teaching me to hear Him more through my senses, more through impressions rather than things that were tangible. That I could say, “This is what God’s saying.” It was more like a sense. That felt hard. But for me it was like, “I’m still going through some of this, but I’m going to be 40 in March.”
For some reason that felt like a big deal to me. I never thought it would. I found myself in this place where I was like, “Everything I thought was going to happen, hasn’t.” There’s a lot of things I have to be grateful for. I have my beautiful family, great husband and I love writing music and I get to record it here and there.
But I had envisioned this life for myself. I had walked through so many real big disappointments that I thought God was going to redeem, thinking, “That label dropped me. God for sure is going to make up for it.” Some of it was like, “There’s a desire in my heart, if it’s there, it must be God, and God’s not removing it. It must be that this is where we’re going.”
I would hold onto those things. Then I just came to a place where I tried a lot of things this year and they just fell through the ground. It was like everywhere I turned to try to do something, the door is closing. There was a lot of rejection that I walked into.
I think God just wanted me, in a big way, to let go of the outcome of what I wanted. It wasn’t that He was asking me to stop creating and stop doing the thing that I love. But He was asking me to stop attaching all of these things to the outcome. Stop writing the story.
Gina:
God’s been talking to me a lot about expectation. A verse He gave me several months ago was the Jeremiah 33:2-3, “Thus says the Lord who made it, the Lord who formed it to establish it (the Lord is His name): ‘Call to Me, and I will answer you, and show you great and mighty things, which you do not know.’”
But then God started challenging me back in October, “Gina, I want you to thank Me for what you don’t know yet, because I do. Start praising Me, start thanking Me for what you don’t know.” There’s been this lesson of how do you have great expectation without imposing your own design of what you think that should look like?
There’s nothing new under the sun. That goes back to Abraham. God gave him this huge promise and word that he was going to be a father of a nation and the poor guy, him and Sarah just wanted one kid. They couldn’t even fathom that, because they just wanted a child and it just never manifested the way they thought it would, which that disappointment alone, that doubt pushed them to start trying to take it into their own hands.
Rheanna:
Some of the rejections and disappointments that I went through were because I was trying to take it in my own hands. I don’t even know if I realized it. It wasn’t like I was outright in sin or trying to do something crazy.
But I was trying to invite myself into circles that I wasn’t invited into, that I already felt rejected by. I walked willingly into that just to learn that God, is like, “We are not going there. It’s going to hurt every time you try.
Gina:
Don’t lean on your own understanding. It’s so challenging, especially in an arena where you can get pretty far on your own strength.
Rheanna:
This is the age of the self-help. This generation that’s coming up and saying, “You can manifest your own destiny.” I am all about dreaming with the Lord, and yes, the Lord has given us a lot of power. He has given us a lot of authority.
But the minute we start trying to do it without Him. “I’m going to manifest it for myself. I’m going to put a number on the board and I am going to go after that number.” There’s nothing wrong with dreaming it up, but I feel the pressure of this culture that is just running after what it wants. It’s not giving a second thought that there might be a bigger picture involved.
The only reason God would ever say, “We’re not going in this direction.” is because “We’re doing something that’s going to fill you up better. That’s going to be more for you that you were designed for.” I can know that about God, but that still hurts. It’s still hard. It’s still been painful for me to just trust.
A Joyful Journey Requires Trust
Gina:
We’ve walked through some hard stuff in our life and our family. There’s been a lot of challenges in a lot of different areas and every time it’s just a whole another level. “Do you trust Me?” Then I have to be honest with the Lord and myself and go, “I thought I did, but apparently I don’t. Show me what’s the thing that’s standing in the way, what’s the lie I’ve taken in as my own that has caused me to not trust You.”
I was leading worship a few weeks back and Matt, who was speaking, he said something that was so great. He said, “The enemy in the garden didn’t tempt Adam and Eve to sin. He attempted them to doubt.” What was the doubt? The doubt was “Did God say? Is He good? is He for you? Is He safe?”
The doubt about our own identity, “Am I actually a son? Am I actually a daughter? Am I actually loved?” If I take that doubt, if I take that temptation, if I start going down that rabbit trail, the enemy doesn’t need to lead me anywhere. I’m going to lead myself. That’s the seed of it.
If everybody understood and believed the goodness of God and His character and who He is and His motives and we believed that we are loved and that we are worthy of that love through Jesus how things would change. How the church would be different. How the world would be different.
In those moments of realization, God is never coming with condemnation and accusation. He’s coming with “It’s okay. Don’t beat yourself up because you went here or you didn’t. Or you stepped or you didn’t step. Now are you ready? Okay. Let’s do this.” Following that too, that’s where we find ourselves.
Sometimes we find ourselves in a place so much bigger than we expected. I never could have dreamed this. Sometimes so much more normal than we expected, but so beautiful. I was making it like it needed to be this, but the simplicity and the smallness is the most miraculous and most powerful.
Rheanna:
Because I’ve been in this space where I’ve just let go of all that for the moment, I do feel like I’ve just let go of the outcomes of things. I’ve been in a place of joy, being able to appreciate every little thing that I have, and knowing not just joy for the moment, there’s also a knowing that there are things around the corner.
For some reason, for me, that’s like a big deal. Ever since I was a little girl, I do trust there’s something around the corner, but it’s important to be able to sit in the time that you’re in, because that’s all we have. God’s building something. I feel like I’ve been in a good place where I’ve just been waiting with God.
It’s not to say that I wasn’t walking through pain, because that’s also important. You have to sit in your pain. You need to not try to fill it and cover it, ignore it and numb out all the time, avoid it and push it away. All the things that we do to not deal with the fact that we’re disappointed.
Somehow it’s bad to be disappointed, but the reality is that it’s human to be disappointed. I feel like I’ve been faithful to just be in this place of grief, grieving things that I thought would work out and didn’t, grieving places that I wanted to be seen by certain people and they didn’t see me. Forgiving those people and knowing that and forgiving myself for all of that. Not carrying shame because we can carry shame in the places.
I have a cool story. I was on this hike the other day. I love to go into nature with God, it’s the Celtic Christian in me. I just want to go get in nature. As I was walking, I felt like the Lord was like, “You are not putting anything in your ears. We’re not listening to anything.” We get on the path and I’m like, “We’re going to talk.” He’s like, “We’re not talking. You’re just going to walk with Me.” We’re walking and I started to get the impressions again. God’s been impressing on me and that’s been His voice lately.
I had to get the impression of nature or the impression of the green on my soul and my spirit, it would minister to me. Or I was walking, I could just feel the presence of God. I got to this one point in the hike where you could go off to the right, which is the like normal way to go. Or there was this little path that was covered in green.
I felt like God was like, “You’re going to walk down that path.” As I’m walking, I had remembered this prophetic word over my life, “Everywhere you step a garden is going to grow.” I felt this beauty unfolding before me and I got to this tree. It was this huge eucalyptus tree, the leaves were coming down to the ground and there was this swing that I had never seen before.
I have run and walked this trail for like a decade and I had never seen this swing. It was hanging down and it was wild, because one thing about me is since I’ve been a little girl, swinging on the playground was where I would talk to God. That was my first memory of a conversation with God was on the swing set.
At that point I didn’t even know who Jesus was, no one had told me about Jesus, I was just having the conversation. There was this swing and it was like a round swing and what was great about it too, is that it was handcrafted. Somebody had spent time making this thing. It wasn’t a board that they got at Home Depot. It was beautiful.
There was an inscription in the swing. This swing said “Life is full of ups and downs, just keep swinging.” I lost it, all alone with God. I just had this moment of like, God has seen my pain. He knows it, and it was even places deep down that I couldn’t even voice. Things that hurt that I couldn’t even get out that God has seen and known it intimately. It was this sweet encouragement.
It wasn’t like he was saying, “Now pull up your bootstraps, young lady and get on with life.” Swinging was joy for me. He was like, “Keep choosing joy. Move forward in joy because there is joy. Just keep swinging.” Wasn’t like “Just keep pushing forward.”
It’s been like this landmark thing this little hike that I took, it changed the tide. That’s when things took a turn and I haven’t been dealing with depression as much and I felt hope again.
Gina:
I love His intimate intentionality with us. That wasn’t a God in heaven speaking to this human, “Be patient, get over yourself.” No, that was a Father talking to His daughter, “Come here. Let me show you something.” In the language heart understands. Going, “Remember when you and I used to swing? We’re going to swing.”
If I have a purpose in my life, I want to show, I want to introduce people to taste and see that this is who He is. This is who He is. He is good. He’s loving, He’s intentional. He’s pursuing outside of the box. He’s not standing waiting for us to screw up. He’s standing there inviting us to come with Him. And our dreams are important.
Check out Rheanna Downey
Check the rest of this conversation Dreaming with God
Check out the Dwell Meditations
