I love traveling. I love to travel to places I’ve never been to meet people I’ve never met, and I love traveling with my family to spend special time together. Every year I do a good bit of both, not to mention repeat trips to churches and networks that I serve through the Future Church Company.
But once every year, I travel alone, and I don’t meet anyone on the other end. It’s just me and God for the weekend.
I spend time with God, and we talk about my life. I settle down long enough to hear what he’s saying and see myself from his point of view. I thank him, I confess to him, I take his direction, and I ask him for the things that truly matter most to what he’s called me to be and do. I reaffirm my calling, and I adjust my view of the future to pursue it more completely.
This is my annual retreat, and I detail how I do it in chapter 24 of my book Younique.
I spend a lot of time on my retreat refreshing my Horizon Storyline. The Horizon Storyline (nicknamed the “1:4:1:4”) is a master tool that casts just the right amount of vision just the right distance in the future.
The top level of vision, the furthest distance away, is what I call the 3-year dream. Its beating heart is a metaphor that captures what I yearn for my life to look like three years from now. For one three-year period, I saw my life becoming a deep well of blessing, free to overflow to those around it. I filled out the metaphor with a vivid description of what that might look like in all aspects of my life.
Most years, I don’t change the dream on my retreat except to sharpen it a bit as it comes into clearer focus. But on the third year, it’s time to dream again and look with God another three years into the future. When I originally wrote Younique, I planned to tell the story of my last 3-year renewal in this post. But instead, I invited two special people to share what they learned at the 3-year mark: Kelly Kannwischer, CEO of the Future Church Company, and Cory Hartman, collaborative writer of Younique.
Kelly Kannwischer’s 3-Year Renewal
“The first decision I had to make was to scope the time, effort, and money I would spend to renew my vision. It would have been easy to say, ‘Well, I’ll just take an hour or two this Thursday night at home and knock it out.’ But I didn’t do that—instead I decided to get away and really spend time alone with God. I saw it as an investment, and it was totally worth it! I recommend to anyone: give yourself the gift of getting away. You won’t regret it.
“When I looked back at what I had dreamed three years before, it felt so good to see how God had shown up in my life. So much of what I hoped would happen was fulfilled.
“On the other hand, there was stuff that was really important to me three years priorthat did not come to fruition. But I didn’t feel disappointed or frustrated as I would have expected. Instead, God let those things fall away peacefully. They just weren’t important to me anymore; I felt at peace.
“My next 3-year dream came a lot quicker than the first time I did it. I took that as an encouragement that I was getting better at living a visionary life.
“Another thing I didn’t expect was the impact of a new dream on my four 1-year objectives—namely, not much! When I reviewed the objectives I had set a year before, I actually kept them for the coming year too, just with added clarity and precision. It was a good lesson that renewal doesn’t always mean ‘brand new’; sometimes it means new understanding and new intentionality about something that’s already been a part of my life.”
Cory Hartman’s 3-Year Renewal
“I think the first thing that stands out about my 3-year renewal is that to a certain extent, it wasn’t a surprise. It’s not as though I had written out a vision, stuffed it in a jar, and buried it in my backyard for three years without looking at it. I reread it at least once a week over all that time. So I was watching God making that dream come true in real time in ways I never could have imagined. I’m still amazed by it!
“Before I started dreaming about the next three years, I reviewed something I wrote about my ultimate contribution a year or so before. I already had a pretty good fix on a couple of ultimate contribution types that really tug at my heart and seem to fit my gifts, but I elaborated on it, describing in detail what I imagined my calling looking like at a convergence point late in life. So when I started to imagine three years ahead, it was partly influenced by that picture much further in the future.
“When it came to sketching some idea of where God might be taking me in three years and where I hoped to go, no metaphor image was coming to me. So instead, I started with vivid description bullets to capture the details of my request to God. Those came pretty quickly and clearly.
“After I had a descriptive paragraph that inspired me, the image came a little easier. I settled on ‘being light that makes all things flourish,’ thinking of how Jesus told his disciples, ‘You are the light of the world’ (Matt. 5:14). I loved it on the retreat, but several months later, I’m actually not sure whether it will stick.
“If it doesn’t, it wouldn’t be the first time. The first time I set a 3-year dream, I picked a metaphor that felt right then, but one year later, things didn’t look the same in my life. So I changed the metaphor to something that just seemed way better, and I held onto that one happily for two years. Now I’m wondering if the same thing is happening again—if once again it’s going to take me a year of sitting with a dream image that isn’t quite right before I arrive at the picture that really captures it.
“I think a lesson for me is that as awesome as an annual retreat is—and it really is!—not everything has to be buttoned up for good by the time you’re heading home. As important a step on the journey as it is, it’s still one step, not every step. It’s a moment in time that brings more clarity, not complete clarity. That’s still progressively revealed as you spiral up the mountain.”
