When it comes to fulfilling your purpose and pursuing you God given dreams, there is one aspect (amongst others) that I find crucial to your success. Who’s in your crew? To put in better, more mature terms, who are you surrounding yourself with? This is so much more important than you think, and a negative group of friends can burn out a heart on fire. The people around you influence you greatly and if those people aren’t supporting you, pushing you, or believing in you, you may get an outcome you didn’t want. Bad friendships can destroy more than just your dreams, they can destroy your view of yourself, of others, and even distort your own values. There is so much influence that happens and yet sometimes we don’t even notice it. If you surround yourself with people who aren’t supporting your dreams, you may find yourself discouraged and even at the point of giving up. This is why finding the right people to be in your circle is vital.

When God prompts you to pursue something, he may point out the things that are hindering you from actually choosing to pursue it. Do you have negative thoughts? Or thoughts that cause you to doubt yourself, or God? If you are going to fulfil your purpose, negative thoughts are only going to poison, what God is trying to bless. We can miss out on so much when we allow the thoughts of the enemy to become our own. He doesn’t want you to fulfil your purpose, or pursue your calling, and he will do everything he can to stop you from doing it. Those thoughts in your head that speak words of discouragement, doubt, and fear, take them captive. They do not belong, and they are not the words from your Heavenly father. When you arefulfilling your purpose you need to rid yourself of those thoughts that are clouding your mind. One way to do this is by being constantly present in God’s word. I find that when I meditate on scripture, it weeds out negative thoughts, yes they still come, but you have a way to come against them, and that is the truth of God’s word.

Lastly, I think that when pursuing your purpose, you need to push aside distractions. This one is easily the hardest for me. I become distracted very easily. I will be sitting down trying to do my math homework and I’ll pull up the calculator on my phone to help me with the problem. 20 minutes later and I am still on my phone scrolling through instagram not even remembering what I was doing before. I know, it’s a disease. I’m working on it. But, I know that I am easily distracted by the simplest things. This can happen in a smaller, and broader spectrum. Sometimes those distractions can be as small as our phones, and as big as a person. Let me relate this on a more personal level. God called me to start a blog. For a while I really wanted to do it, until I became so distracted by all of the things that I was doing, that pursuing my calling was being pushed aside. The dream was still very alive in my heart, but when I would sit down to start working on it, I would become distracted either by people or just by the desire to work on something else. It wasn’t until one of my good friends basically told me to start the blog, and work on it daily. Until I took that time to commit, I wasn’t doing anything to pursue the calling God placed in my heart. I was distracted, and I had let the distraction push aside my dream. Here I am now, a month later and the blog is actually complete. I never would have experienced this, had I not pushed aside those distractions. They can be so sneaky, we don’t even know we are being distracted, and that is the way the devil works. I just want to encourage you to pray and ask God what those distractions look like in your own life, and ask God to remove them.

I believe ridding yourself of this, will help you in your pursuit of your calling. God wants your full attention, and he can do incredible things once you turn it over to him.

2 Corinthians 10:3-5 “We are human, but we don’t wage war as humans do. We use God’s mighty weapons, not worldly weapons, to knock down the strongholds of human reasoning and to destroy false arguments. We destroy every proud obstacle that keeps people from knowing God. We capture their rebellious thoughts and teach them to obey Christ.” NLT

Philippians 4:8 “ And now, dear brothers and sisters, one final thing. Fix your thoughts on what is true, and honorable, and right, and pure, and lovely, and admirable. Think about things that are excellent and worthy of praise.” NLT

Romans 12:2 “Don’t copy the behavior and customs of this world, but let God transform you into a new person by changing the way you think. Then you will learn to know God’s will for you, which is good and pleasing and perfect.” NLT

New Living Translation (NLT)

Changing Your Environment