Dreams: In a Little While

Dreams.

We've all had them.

Sometimes we reach for them

and they vanish as a vapor.

Did I really see it?

Or was it a shadow out of the

corner of my eye,

gone with just a blink.

As any typical teenager, 

I dreamed of marriage and babies.
I'm living that dream.
I tell people,
"It's the one thing I did right."

I never dreamed of college.
I never saw it!
Didn't happen either.
I have no regrets.

As young adult, I dreamed of ministry.
I was in youth ministry.

I never saw this one coming.

God said, "One day you will teach women."

It's one thing to have a dream that you envisioned.
It's quite another thing to have a God-moment, a dream,
a vision, a voice beyond your own thoughts.

I didn't ask for it.  I didn't go looking for it at the time.
I even said, "God, if I leave my ministry to youth,
you will have to knock me over the head."

That was 1987 and I've been knocked over the head
more than once, as God led me in different directions.

What now???

It's been, how many years?
27 years since that God-moment.

I'm still waiting.

I spoke with a counselor about this...
Did I really hear, "One day you will teach women"?
Was it really God?
Did I create the vision in my own mind?
Did I feel what I thought I felt?

I said to him,
It felt like God.
It sounded liked God.
When I think about the moment, I still get the same strong
impression that it was God.

He said,
"If it felt like God, sounded like God, and still moves you like God,
it probably was God."

I know he can't answers those questions for me.

Jacob Armstrong from Providence Church,
wrote,
"Life, does not follow a simple formula.
Instead, we experience life like a story.
We turn the next page and see what is there.
Sometimes it is what we expected.
Usually it is something we didn't.
It unfolds whether we want it to or not,
sometimes too fast,
sometimes too slow."

I am a dreamer.
What I heard and saw that day
has been confirmed many times
through out my life, my ministry...

at a Youth Specialities conference,
 a Ladies' conference,
sitting on a beach with 20 other women
not hearing the rambling of another,
but lost in my own thoughts...

"One day you will do this."

WHAT LORD, WHAT???

"One day you will teach women."

Yes, I still hear it.

My dreams in the night
have taken me many places,
around a mountain in a van,
in a car with a baby.

In all of my dreams,
I am moving in the direction of
where I first heard the call.

In my last dream I am riding a tricycle.
I am on the highway going toward my dream.
Pedaling is strenuous and everyone is passing me.
I'm afraid that I won't get there.

The dream may be an empty longing of
a 53 year old woman who has yet
to reach her dream.

Sometimes I feel like I'm running out of time.

Then I remember...

Abraham was OLD when God spoke.
He and his wife laughed.  They tried to help God along,
taking matters into their own hands.
(Oh how many times, have I been guilty of doing the same!)

God found Moses on the back side of a desert.

David, the shepherd boy had to grow up.

Joseph, oh my goodness.  I can't even begin to tell his story.

My baby girl and her husband have their own dream-
to love and hold a baby of their own.

Today, "Everything looks as expected."
Smile, tears, relief, an anxious heart,
a mama who sees, hears, and believes.

Monday she is scheduled to be at the fertility center
for embryo transfer.  She feels good, a little bloating, but good.

They too having waited, will continue to wait...
for just a little while.

"And the God of all grace, WHO CALLED YOU,
to his eternal glory in Christ, after you have suffered a little while,
will HIMSELF stablish, strengthen and settle you.
To Him be the glory and the power, for ever and ever."
1 Peter 5:10-11

After a Little While,

Bonnie:)