About a year ago, my sister sent my family and I a message from a lady named Terri Savelle Foy, who had spoken at our church while we were away on vacation. This lady’s message was all about chasing your dreams learning to believe bigger. She has a book called “Imagine Big” that I purchased after watching her sermon and her biblical based teachings have been literally life changing! She speaks of the power of our words, the importance of creating vision boards, writing down dreams and goals, reviewing them daily, speaking Bible verses over them, and just having absolute trust in God to achieve them.
Over the past 5 years, Dustin and I have been working towards the goal of selling everything, buying a boat, and sailing away to travel the world together. Over the years, that goal has shape shifted a bit and we have thought several times that we had found “the boat” only to find it was too old and needed too much work, was too small, wasn’t ocean worthy, etc. etc. We have gotten off track more than a few times, but the end goal has remained the same…to live simply and travel as much as we can on the water.
We spent several years remodeling a house that was built in 1900 and only by the grace of God, ended up selling it for more than twice what we paid for it.
Since then, we’ve been living in a small vacation rental home in the off season and on our boat or in our camper during the summers. Last summer, we provided much entertainment for everyone we know as they watched as we bought a camper 6 days before we had to move out of our rental house, then a month later decided we needed a bigger and newer camper and along with it, a new truck to pull it. Then another month later, we decided to sell the camper and the truck because a boat we had been looking for came up for sale (Catalina 36), so we bought that instead. Terri Savelle Foy is always saying “When the vision is clear, results will appear”. We admittedly got off track and lost sight of the vision we had been working towards and lost a lot of money in the process. But once we were introduced to Terri, we quickly got our focus back and realized that instead of taking stepping stones to our dreams and settling for less than what we had envisioned for ourselves, we needed to focus on our picture-perfect dream life right from the start. Instead of shrinking our dreams, we needed to increase our faith in God’s ability to help us make them happen and took steps to make this ultimate dream happen. For us, that crazy, far-fetched dream was owning a catamaran, working remotely, and traveling the globe.
We first went on a catamaran on a trip to Costa Rica and then again in Mexico and once more in Hawaii. Each time, it was such a different and better experience for us than being on a monohull and it got us thinking about how amazing it would be to have one of our own. And we wanted to do it now, not wait until retirement.
So I cut out pictures of the catamaran we wanted along with a couple working from their computers and pasted them on the back of this boat. I then taped photos of our heads onto the bodies of that couple so it looked as if Dustin and I were the ones sitting on our dream boat working from our computers. I posted copies of this all throughout our house so that everywhere we looked, we could begin to envision ourselves on this boat and get comfortable with living this lifestyle and get used to the image of ourselves on this boat. You have to believe you can have something before you can make it happen! At this time, that dream seemed so far off and so impossible! But if your dreams don’t scare you then they probably aren’t big enough! Dreams and goals should be so big that you can’t figure out how to make them happen without the intervention of God. This shows Him our faith and gives Him room to work! So we have been claiming this dream and praying and believing and stretching our faith.
In March 2022, we were contacted by a couple from our previous marina who had decided to put their boat up for sale and wondered if we were interested. This wasn’t just any boat…it was a beautiful catamaran – exactly what we were looking for – and it was for sale in our hometown! What you need to understand about the irony of this is that this boat was built in France, was sailed across the ocean, spent some time in Delaware, and then made its way to South Haven, MI. These boats are extremely rare on the Great Lakes since they are French built. And here we had one being offered to us right on our front doorstep!
After over a month of overcoming a whole lot of attempts from the devil to throw us off course, and wanting to give up a couple of times, we finally made it over all of the hurdles and signed paperwork for our very own 3 bedroom/2 bathroom Lagoon 380 catamaran….the exact one that I had taped our heads on that we had been believing for! And the best part?! We get to leave from our hometown on this journey, which has always been Dustin’s dream. When you make your vision clear and go after it relentlessly while staying in alignment with God’s plans for your life, it is truly incredible what life can look like! We are still a little stunned that we own this beautiful boat! God is truly amazing and so gracious! With enough faith, anything is possible!
We decided to name the boat Trouvaille (Tru-vi) which in French, means “A Lucky Find”. Seemed fitting seeing how the vessel was built in France yet we bought it in our very own hometown. We are so elated for the coming months and are excited to embark on this incredible journey!
Σχόλια