At my family reunion this past weekend, I kept finding myself watching my cousin's little girl. She's three and has that wonder about her that you can actually see. It's in her eyes when she walks into a room, like everything in it is still new and worth looking at. It's in her smile, unguarded, no calculation behind it at all. She hasn't learned yet to check a thing against a list of reasons it might not work before she lets herself consider it.

I don't think she's unusual; other young ones had the same quality. I think most of us started there. And somewhere along the way we picked up a "committee" whose whole job is cataloguing reasons an idea won't work, reasons it's impractical, reasons someone else should be the one to want something instead of us.

This week, without planning it, I kept running into people who'd fired that committee and were living into a vision of what work, family, community, or their own life could look like. What struck me wasn't the vision itself; it was that they were finally saying it out loud. There's something that happens in the saying of a big idea that doesn't happen in the keeping-quiet. The thing stops being a private hope you can talk yourself out of, and becomes something real enough to be responsible to.

I think most of us are carrying some version of that vision right now, quietly waiting. Not gone or even hidden, really. Just waiting for permission to be spoken aloud. What would you like permission to dream out loud? Is there a version of yourself, your work, your community, your church that you have a deep hope for?

My wish for you this week, Reader, is that you'd fire the internal "committee" that tells you why something new can't happen, and let yourself dream and then say the quiet part out loud to a friend, to God, to yourself in the car with no one listening. Let it be real enough to be responsible to. Then say it again. And again. You may find that someone else shares the same hope and can help give it shape. Then another... That's the fiLLLed life.

Live a fiLLLed life, Melissa

P.S. Deborah did the bananas and they were delicious!