This weekend changed me in a way I wasn’t expecting. It started with a dream—two stars colliding. I thought I understood what it meant and even wrote a whole blog post about it, but the more I sat with it, the more I realized there was more to that dream than what I first saw. Maybe the message wasn’t just for me.

That realization hit hard. I broke down talking to my husband about it. My emotions were heavy, my mind racing. To clear my head, we ran a few errands, but by the time we came home, I felt drained. Later that evening, after finishing my blog post about the dream, I was about to ask my husband what he thought when, out of nowhere, I was hit with a wave of nausea so strong it dropped me where I sat.

It came fast. My body felt like it was on fire. Everything burned. I couldn’t see. I had to grab the nearest bag just to keep up with it. Some of it landed on the floor, on my mom’s blanket. My husband looked at me with a mix of concern and confusion—it wasn’t the first time he had seen me get sick like that. Still, he stayed calm, helped me clean up, washed the blanket, and got me to bed.

The next morning, I woke up in pain from head to toe. It was Sunday, the day of my church’s annual picnic, and I had to call my grandmother to tell her I couldn’t make it. My body simply couldn’t move the way it needed to. Instead, my husband and I did what we usually do—our Sunday coffee and conversation outside.

Normally, I save the sermon my boss sends me each week to watch on Monday mornings, but since I had missed church, I asked my husband if he wanted to watch it with me right then. We put it on the TV, and as we listened, I felt something shift.

The message was called: “Need Doesn’t Move God, Faith Does.”

The words echoed my dream. It was as if everything from the past 48 hours—the dream, the breakdown, the sudden sickness—was connected and leading me here. I was reminded of something I had forgotten: I was born with talents, but my gifts are something deeper.

Talents are things I can develop and sharpen. They are valuable and can open doors, even create income. But my gifts… those are sacred. They’re not something I earn or perfect—they’re something given to me. They require me to be rooted, grounded, surrendered. The bag might be in my talent, but the everlasting reward is in my gifts.

In that moment, I realized: I’m in a season of preparation.

The dream showed me what I needed to do to prepare for grief. But the events that followed showed me what I needed to do to prepare for blessings. Both matter. Both require strength. And both require faith—not the kind of faith that’s just words, but the kind that lives in your bones when you don’t even realize it’s there.

I felt every emotion this weekend—sadness, exhaustion, gratitude, reflection. But I never felt fear. Not once. Not when I dreamed, not when I broke down, not even when my body gave out on me.

What I know now is this: I’m being called to surrender. To trust through the joy and the pain. To seek more than what life can give me—to seek the One who gave me life in the first place.

This weekend taught me that preparation isn’t just about bracing yourself for hard times. It’s about strengthening your spirit for the blessings too. Because both will come, and both will test you in different ways.

So if you’re reading this, maybe this message is for you too: You’re in preparation. Maybe not for what you think. Maybe not for what you see. But for what’s ahead—something that requires all of you, not just your talent, but your gift.

And that requires surrender.