142. The Dreaming Phase: When Your Expectations Shape You (Before They Break You)

Last week, Jason and Lauren named the disorientation so many women feel in their 30s — when life doesn’t look the way they imagined. This week, they gently trace the story back to where it began.

Before there was disappointment… there was dreaming.

Lauren reminds listeners that those early dreams weren’t foolish — they were sincere. They mattered. Instead of shaming the younger version of ourselves, maybe we honor her and ask what she was really longing for.

In this episode, Jason and Lauren explore:

• Why dreaming is holy — how desire often introduces you to your design.
• How idealism in your 20s isn’t immaturity, but momentum.
• The subtle shift from “I hope” to “I deserve” when we wait or feel disappointed.
• How timelines and unspoken expectations can quietly become measuring sticks.
• The internal contracts we form: “By 30 I’ll be…” “My marriage will feel like…”

You’ll walk away with practical tools to hold vision without clinging:

• Separate the essence from the packaging.
• Surrender the timeline, not the desire.
• Ask who you need to become to carry the dream well.

This episode is tender, grounding, and hopeful — a reminder that the dreaming phase wasn’t wasted. It was forming you.

Maybe your dream didn’t die. Maybe it grew up.

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Transcript

Welcome And Book Themes

SPEAKER_01 0:00

We're the ballotins and we are passionate about people.

SPEAKER_00 0:03

Every human was created for fulfilling relational connection.

SPEAKER_01 0:07

But that's not always what comes easiest.

SPEAKER_00 0:09

We know this because of our wide range of personal experience as well as our years of working with people.

SPEAKER_01 0:15

So we're going to crack open topics like dating, marriage, family, and parenting to encourage, entertain, and equip you for a deeply fulfilling life of relational health.

SPEAKER_00 0:26

Welcome back, everyone, to dates, mates, and babies with the Valitons. Guys, it's so awesome to be with you today.

From Disorientation To Origins

The Holy Work Of Dreaming

SPEAKER_01 0:31

Yep. Hey everybody. Hope you had a great week. We have been busy, busy over here, just a full first quarter of the year. We had a really fun time with last week's episode. And we let you guys know that I am launching a book this year. And that is quite exciting, obviously, on so many levels for me. But we thought it'd be fun to kind of introduce you to some of the themes in my book because we know that so many of them will relate, you will relate to these themes. And it's fresh on the mind. So we're going to talk through some of things. But last week we we talked specifically to women about that disorienting feeling that comes somewhere in your 30s, where you get past your 20s and you're into that space and you go, okay, some things are solidifying about my life. And all of a sudden, it doesn't look quite like I imagined. So if that's intriguing to you and you haven't listened to last week's episode, I'd say go back and have a listen. But today we want to go back a little bit to understand how we get to that disorientation. How do we actually get to that spot in life where life doesn't quite look like we imagined? And it's because before that disorientation happened, there was a dreaming season where we really envisioned life to look a certain way.

SPEAKER_00 2:07

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 2:08

So we're gonna talk about that season, that dreaming season.

SPEAKER_00 2:10

Yeah. The awesome thing about those dreams is that they weren't foolish, right? They're sincere, they're the ones that mattered when you're young.

SPEAKER_01 2:18

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 2:19

And we'll talk a little bit more about that. But yeah, I love this topic.

SPEAKER_01 2:23

Yeah. I think instead of, you know, this episode is not about like shaming the girl who was a dreamer, not at all. It's more about honoring who she was and asking what was she really longing for? That's great. Like, what about that dreaming and longing and waiting created some disorientation when things didn't quite go as planned? That girl needs to be understood.

SPEAKER_00 2:49

It's true. Right? Yeah. Babe, let's just dive in a little bit. Why is dreaming holy? Like why does God why do why were we born with these dreams in our heart?

Dream Seeds And Surrender

SPEAKER_01 3:04

Yeah, I think you know, dreaming is dreaming about a future and considering the longings inside of your own heart is is how desire really introduces us to our design. So when we're young, and I kind of explain this in the book, I have a little in my mind it's a picture. It's of it's of you know, a baby being born, right? Like God designed in its mother's womb this perfect creation. And the baby is born with like a seed of a dream or a calling or a longing, like a seed is is planted inside of that baby's life. And as a child grows and encounters the world around them, that little dream seed starts to grow. And I think that if we're gonna call it the dream seed, like at some point as you're growing up, you recognize it and you see that it's there, or somebody else calls it out in you and you you start to embrace it, like you like it. And the dream becomes like more of a conscious thing, like this is what I'm going after, or this is what I really want in life, or here's what I want to be when I grow up, or you know, I can't wait to have a family of my own someday. And you actually grab on to that little like sprout of a dream inside of yourself. And then I think what happens to us is the more we grow and it grows along with us, we tend to grip it tightly. And I think human nature is to forget potentially that it was God that put it in there in the first place, and that we don't own it so much as He planted it in us. And so our life is the soil of this dream that is going to come to life. But we have very little control over how that happens oftentimes. And at least, at least in the areas of our of our lives where like our closest to our hearts, you know, marriage, children, family. Like obviously, there's a lot of things that as people we have power in. Like we can make great choices and we can choose to go to school or we can choose to get married or whatever. But, you know, the circumstances of life which become the soil for that dream to grow in and materialize inside of are really beyond our control lots of times. So I think dreaming is holy because it introduces us to our design and our dreams are clues as to what matters most to us, what is our purpose on the planet? Why did God put me here? Who am I in the in in his bigger story?

SPEAKER_00 5:46

Yeah. It's awesome because I really think dreams are drivers.

SPEAKER_01 5:50

Yeah.

Dreams As Drivers For Men And Women

SPEAKER_00 5:51

For like if you take away dreaming and having something that you're aiming for, especially for men. So this is where I would say, as a man, if I don't have something that I'm aiming at, that I'm pointing towards, that I'm like, I'm gonna wake up every day and go through this hard thing. Yeah, a dream does that for us. Right. And I think women too. But as a man, I know for sure. And I just remember when I was young, I had this dream of restoring broken men. And that was something my dad helped me recognize at 13 years old.

SPEAKER_01 6:28

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 6:28

Telling me about David and his mighty men.

SPEAKER_01 6:30

Right.

SPEAKER_00 6:31

Later on in that season, I told my dad, I don't want to go to youth group. It's boring, it's dumb, it's terrible. And my dad had said to me, Hey, it sounds like you're going for yourself. And I was like, Yeah, I think I am. I didn't know what he was talking about. And he goes, Oh, that's the lowest level of living, you know? And I've just felt crushed. And then he said, Hey, you're called to help people. You're called to restore people. That's what you're good at. That's what you want to do. It was him reminding me about my dream of David and his mighty men that really set me up for what I'm doing today, like the rest of my life.

Calling Called Out In Youth

SPEAKER_01 7:10

Yeah. You couldn't have known the journey, right? That it would require for you to grow the capacity in order to walk that out. Because that's what happens is he plants a desire and then he shapes our capacity. You couldn't have known what that road would be like. And I'm reminded, if we're talking about kind of childhood, I'm reminded of being young and having dreams of, you know, doing influential things. Like I had something about me. It was really my dad. It was how my dad spoke to me about myself and my talents and my gifts and strengths. And he always made me feel like they were meant to be used publicly, not necessarily like from a stage, so to speak, but I just had this idea in my head of working in some sort of significant capacity. And then, of course, having a family, like being a wife and a mom. And I, you know, jokingly, once I got into high school and even in college, like my friends knew about me that my dream was kind of that American dream, white picket fence life. And there's nothing wrong with that, but I know now looking back that the reason that the white picket fence life appealed to me so much is because it looked clean and safe and straightforward. It looked like A plus B equals C. Yeah. And especially for my personality, that's the kind of that is the way the dream looked to me. It's because I wanted all those things. I wanted work, I wanted family, I wanted children, but I wanted it to be safe.

SPEAKER_00 8:51

Which in a lot of ways, it's like, who doesn't?

SPEAKER_01 8:54

Who doesn't? Exactly.

SPEAKER_00 8:55

Who wants a life that uh that you has a lot of connection in it and safety.

SPEAKER_01 9:01

Yeah. So, you know, we we look back and and I can see my early, you know, my teen years, my early 20s, my dreams were really fueled by some idealism. And that's not a flaw, that's kind of how it works. But, you know, when we have idols of ideals in our life, we're often confronted with disappointments and pain when those things don't quite pan out.

SPEAKER_00 9:29

Yeah, it's interesting. I think on some level, there's I don't, there's no getting around having some ideals. No, not at all. Because it it just feels like you're looking at what you think from a very limited experience in life, what you think would make life amazing.

Idealism And The White Picket Fence

SPEAKER_01 9:48

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. I think we put some pressures on our on ourselves, you know, in those seasons, you you start making life decisions, you're maybe you choose a spouse, maybe you start having kids, you're into your career. And I think sometimes when we, when we do have clear pictures of what it should have looked like for these dreams to come into fruition, we can put a lot of pressure on our spouses or our careers or our kids to kind of fulfill that internal script. And and the truth is, you know, we get exposed in those areas. We have some of these like internal ideals or these contracts we've made with ourselves exposed when things go a bit differently. And sometimes it sounds like, you know, by the time I'm 25, I'm gonna be married. Yeah. By the time I'm 27, I'm gonna have had my first baby. You know, motherhood's gonna look like X, Y, or Z thing. And ultimately we just have to be careful that our dream doesn't turn into some standard that we measure our life against.

SPEAKER_00 10:48

Yeah, that's interesting. I think authenticity, Brene Brown says, authenticity is letting go of where you think that you should be in embracing really where you're at. Yeah. And that's a that's a hard thing to do. And I I remember thinking, I had this is where it was for me. When I was like 28 or 29, I'd finished my first book and I set this goal for myself to write a book every year. And I was looking at my dad.

SPEAKER_01 11:17

Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 11:17

My dad was, you know, 22 years ahead of me, and he had written, I think, probably 10 or 11 books at that time in his life. And I just thought, that's a great goal. That's a that's a good dream to have, right? Like I'm gonna write a book every single year. And then I got into my 40s. I got 40 and I was like, I haven't written a book since.

unknown 11:39

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 11:40

And it's we have these dreams, we have these things that drive us forward, but it's not reality. The I think the real challenge is when we feel entitled to a dream. And we go from hoping to entitlement. And I think that we we do that by looking at other people, we do that by looking at what we think creates happiness and and also misunderstanding, I think misunderstanding God's ultimate plan for our lives, too, is the Lord is very interested in shaping us into who we are supposed to be.

SPEAKER_01 12:21

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 12:21

Rather than giving us everything that we want to be.

SPEAKER_01 12:24

Right.

Deadlines, Pressure, And Internal Scripts

SPEAKER_00 12:25

And that realization doesn't come till much later in life.

SPEAKER_01 12:29

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 12:29

That realization of life is not, I mean, this is just natural for kids too, right? Like life is not actually all about me. When you grow, when you grow up as a young child, you only have the ability to think about yourself for a long time. Babies only think about themselves and you grow into this more mature place. But I think we can easily get stuck in entitlement. Also, the other thing that I think is really important in when we get stuck in entitlement is you don't believe that God's plan's better than your plan.

SPEAKER_01 12:58

Right.

SPEAKER_00 12:59

And so the entitlement of it didn't, it's not going the way that I want it to go. I'm not gonna be taken care of. Like what's wrong, what's happening is it's an easy thing to get into.

Entitlement Versus Hope

SPEAKER_01 13:10

Yeah. Yeah, it's so true. You know, we've talked about this on the podcast before, and this is true in just about every area of life, but any area where we have an expectation that goes unmet, it can lead to disappointment. So naturally, right, if we if we've carried dreams in our hearts, or if we have let dreaming do its work, which is truly to reveal desires and help us understand what we're created for, you know, what gets us up in the morning, what do we get excited about? What are the things that drive us to do hard work in a day? It's because we're aiming at something. And so, you know, we have to let that dreaming phase do its good work. But ultimately, when we get into kind of that middle phase of life and confront disappointments where dreams have gone differently, or where, you know, maybe even we're still waiting for something to come to pass that we've felt really disappointed by. I think, I think a few things happen. For starters, disappointment reveals attachment. And, you know, is our hope in Christ or is our hope in the outcome of something? Those are important lessons we start to learn. And then I think delay often reveals gaps in our maturity and in our thinking, in the way we think about God, like you said. And then fulfilling of dreams really reveals whether we've built our identity around the dream or around who God has said we are.

SPEAKER_00 14:45

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 14:46

And all of these things, I think, you know, whether the dreams have come to pass or whether there's things that you're left longing for, I think we have to understand that that dreaming phase is never wasted. Yeah. That it helps us really understand where we're longing and who we're longing in, where our hope is, where we're fragile and what we believe about God. So I think maturity, the maturity process, that becoming process, you know, the capacity creating process, which we're going to talk more about next week, is only it only gets to do its good work if first we have had a dream.

SPEAKER_00 15:26

Yeah. It's true. This is where I think it's good to really talk about how to dream without clinging to something, without having to go, this has to happen or else, right? Or if I dream, it might not ever happen. And those are two places that I feel like keep us from dreaming because the dreaming phase is really important. Yeah. And and being able to look back, like you said in the very first part, like what was what did the dream represent? Like maybe your dream of the of the white picket fence represented that security and stability, yeah. Stability, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 16:07

Predictability.

Unmet Expectations And Identity

SPEAKER_00 16:09

And even connection. I see like a lot of connection in there. Yes. And so being able to go, okay, maybe I have to surrender the timeline, but I don't have to surrender the desire. Maybe I have to surrender how it happens, but I don't have to surrender the desire. And I think that's the flexibility that we're all looking for in life is if it has to happen the way that I want it to happen when I want it to happen, like I'm literally going to be disappointed my whole entire life because life doesn't work out like that.

SPEAKER_01 16:45

No.

SPEAKER_00 16:46

And I would say that comes from a deep place of insecurity and fear and our real desire to control. But what's so healthy is to get to a place where you go, okay, I want to have a baby, I haven't had a baby. I want to be married, I haven't been married. I really want to lead men in a strong, powerful way. I don't see that happening in the way that I really want to. Those desires, in and of themselves, are great. They represent connection, they represent purpose, they represent calling. And diving back in with the Lord and asking, in this season right now, how do I steward that dream that you've given me? Not how do I get it to go the way that I want it to go, right? But how do I steward this part that I'm in?

SPEAKER_01 17:35

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 17:35

How do I keep my heart tender to you? Because a heart shutdown, it's that hope deferred makes the heart sick. That deferred part is when I quit hoping. That's actually what it means. When I stop hoping, life becomes depressing. I don't have anything to look for. And there's that other verse that people perish for a lack of vision. And we need something as human beings. We were designed, we were built for a purpose. We were built with a dream in mind. God, before I knew you, and before I formed you in your mother's womb, I knew you. I was thinking about you. God created a pathway and a plan for us. So we are born to dream. The dream is an invitation, invitation to a journey.

SPEAKER_01 18:24

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 18:25

The journey is a trust journey and a connection journey with God. And so being able to like step fully into that is the challenge.

How To Dream Without Gripping

SPEAKER_01 18:34

Yeah, absolutely. And ultimately, I do think that it's really significant that we step back a minute and really take time to consider with God the fact that, you know, we've grown into someone who is so aware of my own desire. I'm so aware of my own desire. We could call it desire or dream. I'm so aware of what I'm longing for that it feels like mine. And I think it's just been so helpful and refreshing to me to step back and consider anything that I deeply long for, anything that I strongly desire, or anything that I dream of for fulfillment, ultimately at the core of that thing, it was placed there by God in a seed form. And I'm just the soil that that thing gets to come to pass inside. Like my life is a garden and God has planted all kinds of seeds. And those things are going to grow into all kinds of things that I'm not completely in control of. And I think it's good that we have ownership because God's created us to be co-laborers with him. We get to dream with him, we get to create with him, we get to name with him, we get to find, you know, create meaning with him, we get to imagine, we get to explore all of that. But if we think that we own the right to an outcome, that we've missed it.

SPEAKER_00 20:03

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 20:04

And and yet that we have dreams and desires is so significant because it makes a way for us to go through those formation seasons, the capacity growth, the the uh the becoming. Again, we'll we'll talk more about that next week.

Surrendering Timelines Not Desires

SPEAKER_00 20:22

But I love it.

SPEAKER_01 20:23

Yeah, these things feel these are exciting conversations to be. Yeah, I mean, the This is so relatable. This is this is what it is to be human.

SPEAKER_00 20:29

It is, and going through for and asking yourself, like, where did I let this dream go? Or where am I demanding and getting back to a place of some health? Like the dream that I have when I was young isn't wasted.

unknown 20:45

Right.

SPEAKER_00 20:46

Like maybe God grew it up, maybe maybe it's matured, right? And there's something really great in it. And I just I really do. I think God doesn't waste your dreaming season. He uses it to introduce us to the person that we're becoming, and that formation is as important, as important as the dream.

SPEAKER_01 21:09

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 21:10

So, guys, thank you so much for listening. Thanks for coming every week and listening to the podcast. We appreciate you. Please like, subscribe to our podcast. Also, send this to a friend who really needs to hear it.

SPEAKER_01 21:23

Yeah. You can keep looking for news about my book release that's coming out this year. We're not exactly sure when, but it is exciting. And if this topic or if these stories really resonate with you, I'm glad. My hope is that my book would be something that especially women could read and feel seen and known in, that it would be very relatable and encouraging. So yeah, keep on the lookout.

SPEAKER_00 21:49

Love you guys. See you later.