Fight for It: The Battle for Your Dream

Every dream has a breaking point — the moment where everything you built, everything you believed, and everything you thought you were ready for gets tested all at once. This is the dream battle: the pressure, the wrestling, the spiritual heat that exposes what’s real and burns away what isn’t.

In Episode 8 of the Dream Blueprint, we step into The Ordeal: the part of the journey no one wants but every dreamer faces. It’s the season where the dream feels too heavy, the resistance feels too strong, and you start to wonder if you misheard God or misjudged your own capacity. It’s the moment where you’re forced to confront your motives, your identity, your expectations, and your limits.

In this episode, we explore:

• Why every dream has an ordeal season
• The spiritual and emotional pressure that reveals what’s real
• How to navigate the “everything is breaking at once” moment
• What God is actually doing in the wrestling
• How the ordeal prepares you for the pivot that comes next

If you’re in a season where your dream feels like it’s fighting you, this episode will help you understand the deeper work happening beneath the chaos. You’re not failing. You’re being forged.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to the Dream Blueprint. I'm Catherine Craddock. Today we're stepping into one of the most defining chapters of the entire dream building journey, the part no one wants but everyone walks through. If episode seven was the cocoon, the melting, the undoing, the quiet transformation, then episode eight is the moment you step out and instead of fresh air, you walk straight into a headwind so strong it almost knocks you back inside. This is the moment where you whisper, I thought I was past this. I thought I was strong enough to get out of the hospital bed without falling. But you're not falling, you're not failing, you're not behind. And I want you to hear me very clearly. You're not being punished. You're entering what Joseph Campbell in The Hero's Journey calls the ordeal. It's the season where everything that can shake does shake, not to destroy you, but to reveal what's unshakable. It's the hero fighting the dragon. It's like the moment in the Marvel movie where it gets all really confusing and all the superheroes are fighting each other. It's like just random buildings being blown up. It's it's the battle, right? It's usually the part of the movie that I walk out of the room because I'm like, yeah, yeah, yeah. And the good guys win. But it's my son's and my husband's favorite part. This part is really tough. It's testing the new person that you're becoming and making you stronger. And so today let's enter the ordeal. Let's walk through it together. It's where the hero faces the dragon, the storm, and the thing that threatens everything. But in real life, it doesn't look like a dragon. It looks like bills you can't pay and dreams collapsing, and people misunderstanding you and judging you, and doors slamming, and prayers that feel unanswered, just like black void of iron. It feels like pressure from every direction. The ordeal is the season where everything breaks at once, and you have to step forward, anyways. You have no choice. People are depending on you. You are depending on you. And that strength, that kind of that you don't know that you have until you need it, that is what this episode is all about. I talked before about my season of loss, my season of shrinking back and healing. But if you recall, I grew up my whole life as part of a ministry family. Even my jobs in the outside world were nonprofit fundraising. So the world that I knew was not a very luxury, fancy world. It was a world of serving others, of relying on God's provision. And I still rely on God's provision, but that's another story. But at the end of the day, the universe that we were living in, the community that we were living in, it was of high value to have only one salary where the spouse didn't work and stayed at home and had a lot of kids. And so we had, I wanted to have, they were all planned and chosen. We had about five kids at the time. Later we had six. But we were trying to make everything work on this one salary in my occasional writing jobs, but it was getting really, really tight. I am a fiend with a budget. And I know how to work TurboTax so great. If you're self-employed and if you're a ministry family, I know about how to save electricity and negotiate insurance bills, like living on nothing. But it got to the point where our budget, our Dave Ramsey dollars, was $100 a week for groceries. And one day we found ourselves, it's the middle of the recession and everything. I found myself with only $32 in the bank. And I was literally looking in couch cushions. I was raiding my sock drawer for any kind of change because I couldn't afford the overdraft fees. So I had to go to the bank with whatever I could scrounge. And I just fell to my knees in my bathroom and I prayed. I said, God, we don't have any money. I don't know what to do. We've been serving you faithfully and we have nothing. And at that very moment, there was a knock at my front door, and I ran downstairs. The dog's going crazy. And there was a person I'd never met before. And she said, Hey, here, you probably forgot about this, but this is the final payment on the car that the used car that we bought from you a while ago. And I was supposed to bring it to you. And I opened up the envelope and it was $3,000 from a minivan that we had sold about a year prior. And this person I've never seen before or since left me with $3,000. That was the kind of thing that happened all the time when we were in ministry. And so I was very comfortable with living with this kind of uncertainty. But it became clear that we were going to have to pursue other kinds of income to provide for all of these kids. So I picked up more writing jobs. Chris was doing a side hustle that was like he'd have to wake up at 4 a.m. and he'd work from 4 a.m. till nine, and then he'd work the ministry job till midnight. And so we decided that we were going to flip houses. And we at first it worked. And we flipped a couple of houses and we made more money than we'd ever seen in our entire lives. In fact, I got scared and I said, Chris, that's good. God's blessed us enough. We can take this money and we'll be generous with it. Let's move on, right? But we started to have other people relying on our flips. And so Chris went all in. And at one point we had, I don't remember the exact number, but it was something like 13 properties, maybe more. And we were borrowing from friends and family to invest in the business. And the houses weren't flipping quickly. They weren't being finished quickly enough. And the market had shifted. And so all of a sudden, I remember Chris coming to me. I was seeing the bills come in and I was like, hey guys, I don't know that anybody's checking the finances, but like, we can't really keep affording this. And the other people on the team, they were like, oh no, I have this house feels so good and it's a good deal. And they were going on vibes. And I was like, the math's not mathing because math doesn't care what your emotions are. Money doesn't care what your emotions are. This is the math, right? And in this awful, humiliating day, like Chris was losing his hair and he was just stressed out all the time. There's a lot of shouting in the house. And finally I said to him, Chris, please tell me that our personal house is not at risk, right? And that's when he told me, Catherine, I think we may have to declare bankruptcy. We might be foreclosed on. I don't know where this money is going to come from. And all my life I had been so conscientious about paying off debt. I consider myself a wise planner, a long-range planner. As you know, that's the theme of this entire podcast is careful long-range dream building. And suddenly I found that I had signed my name to loans that I could never repay. It was $10 million. And Chris said, yes, that the house is at risk. And I remember being at a mother's of preschoolers group, and we're sitting there and we're doing like time. And one of the moms is sharing that she's $10,000 in debt, and that's a lot. I remember sitting there thinking, like, can't even share how in debt I am. Because I don't think anybody at this table can fathom being millions of dollars in debt, owing friends and family hundreds of thousands of dollars, right? And this was just such a dark point. We would pray every night for this one house to sell. Me and the kids, I would stand outside their bedrooms and we would pray for this one house to sell. Because if that house sold, then a lot would be solved. And the house didn't sell. And just remember going into the kitchen. And remember, if you remember the cocoon, and if you remember my grief stories, like I had been going through a lot of people dying, a lot of personal projects not working out, pregnancy, all this stuff. I was already not in a great place. And the kitchen was dark, and I got down on the kitchen floor on my knees. And I just said, God, are you there? Can you hear me? Help. And I just sobbed because I was like, How could I have been so foolish? How could I have been so like not speak up and say, hey, this is a bad idea, like enough, you know? I I but it hadn't been a bad idea until it suddenly was, right? And this was I had thought I had hit the darkest point, and this was the darkest point. And no, like, as soon as he confessed to me that like that we had built was at risk. You can see my distress. I keep like, was questioning his leadership, I was questioning our marriage, everything. And I remember the next morning, he just called me over, and he had this little desk and this little computer, and he pulled me over and I had me sit in his lap and he said, I want to show you something. And pulled up on YouTube the Art Williams Just Do It speech. And in it, Art Williams just basically tells you that, okay, life is hard. Roll up your shirt sleeves and just do it. Do what you have to do. He said, I'm not telling you it's gonna be easy, I'm telling you it's gonna be worth it. Winners win. And if you want to win, you gotta just do it. And then he goes, just do it and do it. And something in me shifted because I realized I wasn't being punished, I was being prepared, and God silence in that moment when he had given miraculous provision so many times before was his answer. And it was time for you to step up. It's time for you to do things that you don't think are in your genius zone, that you don't think are in your wheelhouse. I need you to use your strength, I need you to use your creativity. I have something new I'm doing. You know, James 1, 2 through 4, it says, consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance. Let perseverance finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking in anything. Because strength isn't built in victory, it's built in the pressure. So that morning I was like, okay. Chris was like, I'm gonna get my real estate license. And I said, okay. And I said, let's start building a real estate business. And that morning, we did never run a business in our lives, but I opened up Facebook. I knew how to make a Facebook page, I knew how to advertise, and we named it Redux Realty. And I made this little Facebook page and just started inviting my friends. Everybody I knew, I invited them to join the Redux Realty page. And I announced we are selling houses now. And Chris would call people up and he'd say, Do you know anybody looking to buy, sell, or invest in real estate? And people would give us names and we would work it from there. This moment we started to have to completely reinvent ourselves because we had no choice. We needed to pay back our friends and our family. We needed to provide for ourselves for the first time. And we didn't feel ready, we didn't feel qualified, we didn't feel strong, we didn't feel like real business owners. We rented an office. We're like, what is this? You know, or like HR. Like, I had to be in charge of HR. I don't, I've never done HR in my life, right? Like figuring out payroll and taxes and our first hires. But we stepped forward anyways, and that's what makes it an ordeal. It's not about the pain and the pressure or the fear. It's why I have a smile on my voice and on my face when I talk about this, because as hard as all of that was, and it was hard, and I saw no future, I can talk about it today with joy because God met us there and did a new thing in our lives that went on to bless a lot of people because we had the courage to move through it. There's a point in every transformation when you realize no one can carry you through this part. They can love you, they can pray for you, they can cheer you, but they cannot do the becoming for you. A butterfly has to push against the walls of the chrysalis until its wings are strong enough to hold its own weight. If you cut the cocoon open to help, the wings never harden. The butterfly doesn't fly. I love chickens. I've hatched way too many of them. It's a problem. But I've learned that the chick has to break their own shell. A tiny beak hitting the same spot over and over again, that's what forces the oxygen in its lungs. That's what builds the strength that it needs to stand. And if you crack the shell for it, it won't survive. Not because you didn't care, but because you interrupted the very process that made it capable of living. Somewhere in the middle of my own breaking, going from pastor's wife to realtor's wife, going from stay-at-home, work-at-home mom and copywriter to small business owner and later bigger business owner. I started to understand that God wasn't being cruel, he wasn't being silent, he wasn't withholding rescue, he was letting the struggle do its work, and he knew just how much I could take. There are seasons that he doesn't pull you out of because the pressure is what forms you, and there are identities that he won't let you keep because they're built for who you were. The caterpillar, the goo. They're not built for who you're becoming or who you need to be in the next chapter of your life. There are shells he won't crack because the cracking is what makes you strong enough to walk into the next chapter. Again, the ordeal isn't punishment, it's preparation, it's the strengthening that happens right before your wings open and you fly. You know, the amazing thing about that time that I'm so proud of is that we didn't lose our house. We paid back every penny to our family and friends. We did not shy away from that. We didn't walk away from the problem. I had a husband who trusted me enough to not lie to me and to be open and honest about the difficulty that we were in. And because of that integrity, the people around us trusted our integrity in business, trusted that our word was good, trusted that our marriage was solid, and that our business partnerships were solid. We stayed partners with the people that we were working with, and we built a multi-million dollar company. And then we built 17 companies, all of them in the black. Now we have over 80 employees, we have 700 plus clients a year, and after a it's been more than a decade, it's about 13 years now, maybe 14. We have a legacy of generosity, service, and impact. And more important, people trust that when they're going through a hard time, when they're struggling as real estate investors or homeowners or wannabe homeowners, we're the people that they can trust with that intimate knowledge, that shame. And we are the people that they can trust to help them solve the problem and get out of it and write a new story and a new dream. That's what Redux means. It means taking something old that was great for the time and redoing it and remaking it and remixing it into something different, not better, just different and fresh and new. My favorite book that got me through this time was is by Charlie MacKesee. It's called The Boy, the Mole, the Fox, and the Horse. And one of the main truths that was in it was there's the horse and the boy are walking, and the boy says, We have such a long way to go, sighed the boy. Yes, said the horse, but look how far we've come. This ordeal time, it can feel endless, but then you can look back and see how far you've come. Another quote that I love from the book is sometimes just getting up and carrying on is brave and magnificent. You know, the multi-million dollar businesses and all the trappings of everything I have now, the horses and the chickens and the fancy cars, and that's all well and good. But it's the real gift of that time was that sense of self that I now have, that I can do hard things. And that if bad times come and they will come again, I can survive them and I can get up and I can carry on, and I can be brave and I can be magnificent, even if nothing went according to my original plans. In Galatians 6 9, the Bible encourages us this way: let us not become weary of doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up. If you're in the ordeal right now, if everything feels heavy, if everything feels stacked and loaded and everything feels like too much, please hear me as your voice of encouragement and your cheerleader in this battle. You're not failing. You're not behind. You're not being punished for some sin. A lot of times in these ordeal situations, you're being strengthened and disciplined for the dream, the good thing ahead that you're about to carry. The ordeal is not the end of the story, it's the middle. It's the muscle building, it's the conditioning, it's the part where you learn what you're really made of and what God's known that you're made of the whole time. Because you are made of steel and spirit. You're not a caterpillar anymore, you're not goo, and you don't belong in the cocoon anymore. You belong outside, drying your wings, pushing through the shell, pushing through the cocoon, strengthening yourself so that you can fly. In episode nine, we're gonna step into the new chapter, the part where you begin to prune away the old identity that cannot go with you into the dream that God is calling you to build. Because the ordeal strengthens you, but pruning transforms you. The ordeal shows you what you're made of. Pruning shows you who you're becoming. And in episode nine is when we talk about the sacred, painful, necessary work of releasing the version of yourself that was built for survival so that you can step forward into the version of you that was built for calling.