What do you do if your dream is so much higher and farther from your reality?

Allow me to share two approaches when you’re caught in between your dream and reality.

Number one: Fit your dream to your reality.

Lower your ambition to adjust to your current situation.

Or, number two, work hard so your reality will fit your dream.

Instead of downgrading your dream, you adjust your reality by toiling and achieving your goals.

You might say, “Yeah. The second one is the right approach.”

My answer? It depends.

That’s why you need discernment.

You need to pray. You need to seek mentors. You need to constantly receive God’s Word. Then, over time, you’ll know what approach you should take for a specific dream.

There are some dreams that you need to be practical about and you have to adjust your goal to fit your reality.

I’ll give you a simple example: setting your alarm clock at 5:30 in the morning.

Before you go to bed, you tell yourself, “I will wake up early tomorrow!”

But you wake up and you’re tired, so you press the snooze button . . . and then press it again for ten more minutes. And again. And again.

Six times after pressing the snooze button, you finally get up at 6:30 a.m.

So why not set your alarm clock to 6:30? That way, you’ll get a whole extra hour of uninterrupted sleep.

Here’s another example.

There’s a guy who wants to be an NBA player.

But his height is 4’9”.

Do you think he will become an NBA player? I don’t think there’s a team that will accept him.

But maybe he can say, “I have a passion for NBA. I’ll never be an NBA player, but I can be an NBA manager. Or an NBA broadcaster. I can even be an NBA team owner!”

So you can adjust your dream to fit your reality.

I’ll give you an example of the other approach—of fitting your reality to your dream, working hard, and being faithful through the years.

In 1996, we started Anawim, our home for the poor, abandoned elderly.

It’s located on a five-hectare property. I lived there for three years and I loved living with the poor. In my mind, I had a dream and I told everybody about it. I said, “We will have ten centers for the poor.”

Back then, people probably thought, “What? This one is already so difficult and expensive to run. And you want ten of these?”

But I had a dream.

Today, twenty-six later, that dream has come true.

We have a center for pregnant women in crisis. We have a home for sexually abused children. We have a scholarship foundation for deserving students who can’t afford their tuition. And other programs to help the least, the lost, and the last.

It took almost thirty years, but here we are now.

Sometimes, the problem is not how big the dream is.

The problem is our time frame.

There are times when we have unrealistic deadlines. But what we need are patience and faithfulness.

If what we want to accomplish is not for our ego, why rush? What’s the hurry?

Take your time.