The Dream Killer

Hi, and welcome back. Last time I shared with you about a traumatic experience I had at a creative seminar I attended. On that day, I realised that I no longer had any dreams, and that hope had been banished from my heart. Everything came crashing down; I was in shock.

How had I let myself get into such a mess?

I asked Holy Spirit that question, and He told me that I had been living in ‘survival mode’. Everything I did was subconsciously designed with the aim of just surviving. Just get by…just pay the bills… just keep serving at church... be a good wife and mother…just be thankful for what you have…don’t expect any more…don’t hope for anything to change…don’t think about going on a holiday, just be content with time at home as a family…don’t think about buying new clothes, just be grateful for charity shops…don’t expect to go out to restaurants, just be thankful you have food in the pantry…don’t look to the future, just focus on getting through today.

It was all about today.

Just keep going.

Put one foot in front of the other.

Look at the path in front of you. Don’t look up and definitely don’t look too far ahead. Just get through today. Just survive.

And I was. I got good at just surviving, even making it look fun at times. But it wasn’t. It was killing me, shutting me down bit by bit.

A survival mindset is the biggest dream killer out there.

It causes you to focus on what’s in front of you now, because that’s all you are able to handle, so you stop growing or moving forward. It hinders you from investing in opportunities or other people because you aren’t able to think about future possibilities, only about getting by now. It limits your desire to learn new things because there is always too much on your plate right now.

I had fallen into the trap of just surviving.

The Israelites faced a similar situation when they were slaves in Egypt. The generation that escaped Egypt under the leadership of Moses had been born into slavery. Their fathers had been slaves, their fathers’ fathers had been slaves, and their great-grandfathers had been slaves. In a similar way that animals that have been bred in captivity struggle to survive in the wild, the Israelites were utterly ill-equipped to enter the tantalising but terrifying new world of freedom which they found themselves in when they escaped Egypt. Why? Because they were slaves. They had always been slaves and, up until then, they probably thought they always would be.

Slaves don’t have dreams, only masters.

Slaves don’t make decisions; they just do what they’re told.

They don’t get to choose; their choices are made for them.

Slaves don’t know what abundance is; they only know how to long for more.

They don’t know how to plan for the future, only how to survive the present.

They can’t imagine life as a free person, because they lost the ability to dream.

When you have a survival mentality, you think of yourself as a victim. You feel powerless to change your circumstances, and so instead, you focus on blaming other people or things for your problems. It’s your parents’ fault, it’s the government, or your job or your family, or because of where you live, or your upbringing or your lack of education … the blame list is endless.

The children of Israel did that. They blamed Moses for taking them out of Egypt. Exodus 14:11-12 says, “Then they said to Moses, ‘Because there were no graves in Egypt, have you taken us away to die in the wilderness? Why have you dealt so with us, to bring us up out of Egypt?  Is this not the word that we told you in Egypt, saying, ‘Let us alone that we may serve the Egyptians’? For it would have been better for us to serve the Egyptians than that we should die in the wilderness.’”

They were really good at the blame game. Nothing was their fault because they were just victims of their circumstances. In their eyes, it was always Moses’ fault, or Aaron’s, or God's. Moses had just risked everything, facing off against one of the greatest world powers of that age, in order to free his people from the tyranny of Pharaoh. They should have been thanking him, not blaming him.

That’s what a survivor mentality does.

It trains you to justify your own limited survival mentality in order to make yourselves feel better about where you’re at. Survivors will usually complain ... a lot! The Israelites were really good at that, too! They complained when they couldn’t drink the waters of Marah (Exodus 14:24), they complained about the lack of meat in their diet (Exodus 16:2-3), they complained when God killed a group of leaders, even though these 250 men had instigated an insurrection against Moses and Aaron (Numbers 16), and they complained and rejected God when He wanted to speak to them face to face at Mount Sinai.

For someone with a survivor mentality, complaining can sometimes be a way of trying to get attention and sympathy. However, most of the time, instead of helping, it only serves to pull them further down into a spiral of negativity, and, unfortunately, the attention they get is not always the kind they hoped for.

That’s not all it does.

There’s another mindset that grows in you, like a cancer, when you have a survivor mentality …but you’ll have to wait until next time to find out what it is!

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Until next time ….

Can you relate to any of the symptoms of a survival mentality mentioned above?

·        Do you struggle to focus on anything other than what’s in front of you right now?

·        Do you find it difficult to plan for the future?

·        When you think of the future, does it fill you with hope or despair?

·        Do you find yourself blaming other people for the difficulties you are facing?

·        Are you a complainer?

If you find it hard to answer these questions, try to discuss them with a trusted friend or family member. If you answered ‘yes’ to some of them, you might be living your life under a survival mindset. But don’t despair! God will not leave you in it!

Ask Him to remind you of some specific memories, to help you to clarify what the survival mindset looks like for you. Trust Him to walk you through the process of changing from a survivor to a victor. More about this in the next couple of blogs.

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Nicky Heymans is a published author of The Wilderness Series, a trilogy about Joshua son of Nun’s story of the Israelites’ exodus from Egypt, their forty years of sojourning in the wilderness, and their entry into the land of Canaan. For more details, see Nicky’s website,

https://www.nickyheymansauthor.com/ , or her Facebook page, Nicky Heymans Author.