The house was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright in the 1940s. The last owner was a Hollywood movie star whose face we would all recognize.

And I’m standing in the kitchen, making eggs and toast like I’ve lived in this house a thousand days. Like it is perfectly normal for me to look out the window to the sprawling lawn beyond the pool. Or go to outside and pick oranges from the trees.

Before this, we lived in a multi-million dollar home overlooking Los Angeles, the home of a Director friend who you could say is doing quite well in Hollywood. And we thought that couldn’t be topped. And then we end up in this place. This place full of history, that sends hipster lovers of modern architecture into jaw-dropping shock. This place that has enough room on the land to hold two of the last house.

This year of living as nomads, with suitcases never quite unpacked and home defined by people rather than a stable place, has been….unbelievable. As in, extraordinary and difficult to believe. Had you sat me down last year to tell me what we were going to walk through, the way prayers would be answers and provision given, I would not have understood. I could not have grasped what you were telling me because I could not see how the streams would pour forth in the desert before us.

This dreamer has learned a stunning reality: I am unimaginative and uncreative when compared to what God envisions for my life.

He is not limited by our imaginations or expectations. He thrives in the wide open, uncharted and undiscovered spaces that scare us.

Our greatest dreams look like stick figure drawings next to the life God envisions for us. Not necessarily a life of mansions and millions of dollars, but a life of breath-taking moments watching His hand move, of daily reminders that we are seen and loved by the One who speaks worlds into existence and breathes life into dead bones.

Jumping into the life of faith with both feet does not guarantee security in four walls and a bank account that stays comfortably full. It does not guarantee health and happiness, a marriage that never hits the rocks, children that rarely rebel.

But what if life is more than a mortgage payment and well-behaved kids?

What if life were lived among the wind and the waves, rather than beside a quiet stream?

In the still moments, does our soul whisper for security and predictability or the thrill of adventure?

Could you have imagined splitting the Red Sea, or an ark to carry the world while the rains poured down, or a slave in prison elevated to second in command or a shepherd boy that becomes king? And what of a virgin who gives birth, God encased in human flesh and a brutal death on a cross that is only the beginning rather than the end?

Oh how small we dream when we dream only what we could achieve.

When the desires of the heart are desires from His heart, they will come to pass. But the how and when are best left to the One whose abilities cannot be constrained, whose imagination is limitless and whose love for us is extravagant.