Ambition vs Vision

‘I want to’ ‘I’d love to’ ‘how beautiful would it be if’

Desires! Hopes! Aspiration! Ambition!

I write this piece from the premise that the conflict between what we want and what God wants for us is an ongoing one. By birth, every human remotely acquires the ability to wish, want, will and work towards to specific ambitions. However, if such ambitions are not seeds of a vision, all efforts directed at achieving them might end up in a rat race, a sad adventure of motion without promotion.

Our desires and delights are powerful and to a great extent, define our aspirations and expectations. They could be product of our fears, failures, feelings, likes and dislikes and could go a long way to determine how our days, weeks, months and years will go.



After years of relentlessly pursuing a course, often times I hear people say ‘I missed it’, I should have considered XYZ from the onset. I should have measured twice and cut once. This sad and sudden realization has made some people given up on life and everything around them. They based major life decisions on what others where doing rather than what God was doing. They are now apostles of their misfortunes.

They are folks who have judged a book by the cover and jumped into the ‘wrong’ relationships, picked up ‘juicy’ but unknowingly life-damaging careers, fiercely jostle for seemingly ‘bright’ but glory-sapping opportunities and even jetted mysteriously into ‘god’s own’ but eventually agony-loaded countries and would later languish terribly in regret.

Where could they have missed it in their calculations?

The answer; putting ambition ahead of vision

I submit that God, our sweet, loving creator is not the author of wasteful and regretful living. His plans are locked up in His vision for our life. We run into troubles when we adopt the bottom-up rather than top-down approach. We push our feelings, wishes and personal ambitions to Him for His endorsement rather He handing out His plans to us for our compliance.

While God will not take the power of our aspirations and ambitions from us, He is actually counting on us to remember we did not create ourselves and we could not have had a plan for ourselves from onset. He is hoping we would acknowledge that there is a divine plan behind our life that is bigger and greater than all our capabilities. Our skills, education, experience and personal abilities will NEVER equate this divine plan.

God is only one who will birth this plan into our life. Once we are committed to living our vision, He will orchestrate everything around us to direct us to the place of the unfolding of this vision. He will burn all the bushes He wills to get our attention. He will supernaturally make provision available for our vision.

Life is too short to be wasted on regrets. It’s time to jettison personal ambitions and go for our God-designed vision.