“The hardest part of any dream journey is the holding pattern.”

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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