A
thought by Mark Batterson (2016-09-06) from his book, Chase the Lion: If Your Dream Doesn't Scare You, It's Too Small (Kindle Location 1609). The Crown Publishing
Group. Kindle Edition. (Click
on the title of the book to go to Amazon.com to buy the book.)
Somebody
needs this thought today? Maybe it is
you. Read on.
Mark says, “It’s
the twenty-five years between God’s promise to Abraham and the birth of Isaac.
It’s the thirteen years between Joseph’s dream and his interpretation of
Pharaoh’s dream. It’s the forty years between Moses’s dream of delivering
Israel and the Exodus.”
He goes on, “Almost
every dream I’ve had has gone through some sort of holding pattern, and it can
feel like a holding cell. I felt called to write when I was twenty-two, but my
first book didn’t get published until I turned thirty-five. Thirteen years felt
like forever, and I got frustrated. But I leveraged that holding pattern by
reading thousands of books while my dream sat on the tarmac.”
He then
says, “It took five years of circling a crackhouse in prayer before we finally
got a contract on our piece of the promised land. Then it took another five
years to rezone 201 F Street NE and build Ebenezers coffeehouse. In the past
decade we’ve served more than a million customers and given more than $ 1
million in net profits to missions. We’ve even been voted the number one
coffeehouse in DC a time or two. But it took a decade just to get to ground
zero. If you dare to dream big, you better think long.”
Now I do
want to show something else in here.
Mark says, “When it comes to discerning the will of God, I subscribe to
a twofold litmus test. You have to be released
from and called to. And in my
experience, the calling is easier to discern than the releasing. If God has released you, then continuing to
do what you’ve been doing isn’t faithfulness. It’s disobedience. You need to
let it go. And don’t look back. If God hasn’t released you, don’t let go! You
have to hang in there.”
So if the
dream, the call is from God, don’t let go no matter how long it takes. Just hang in there.
So how are
you doing?
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