Elements of Vision 2

Plant the Seed

There are several ways to plant the seed of your vision. The first is to communicate it to others and plant the seed of the idea in them. If you want others to be passionate about your idea, you must first be passionate about it yourself. If you just looked around you, saw several things that were missing and picked one like a lottery, chances are you won't be very passionate about it. It's just one need among many. But if it is something you yourself have experienced or something God has been preparing you for all your life, it will have more meaning for you personally and thus a more intense perspective. Nevertheless, do not trust hyperbole ("hype") born of passion to sway potential co-workers into joining you. God will speak to them just the same as He spoke to you. "Therefore pray the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into His harvest" Matt. 9:38.

Of course, the simplest commodity you possess that you can invest in your vision is time, and yet that is often one of the most difficult; there are many distractions in life that will steal your attention if you let them. You must continually seek God about your priorities versus His priorities; you will often find them contrary to each other, simply because we don't always see what He sees. Where we see the obvious symptom, He sees beneath the surface to the root cause. He does not lose focus on the task at hand like we do, sometimes chasing rabbits or being distracted with our own desires. His attention never wavers like ours, nor does he grow weary in well doing (Gal. 6:9). Perhaps the most effective deterrent to wavering attention is to live with your vision. When you don't have to get up and drive to the site or back home, it gives you the opportunity to live with your vision. At least, that was our experience at the Dream Center, where we lived and worked on property. It became our community, and we supported each other in our visions through moral assistance, verbal encouragement, and physical involvement. The use of koinonia can be very effective in executing a vision.

One of the more difficult areas of planting the seed is the financial area. How much of your own money do you invest in the vision? Most rationale Christians recognize that you normally don't "take the food out of your children's mouths" to support your ministry. You need to provide for your family as a matter of course. If that means holding down and part-time or even a fulltime job to support your family in addition to contributing to the ministry, that is a decision you, God, and your family must make together. It has been said that "Money follows ministry," meaning that when you are actually doing something beneficial, others will see it and begin to contribute to your efforts. Sometimes that means you must "prime the pump," so to speak, from your own resources. Sometimes the presence or lack of financial resources can be an indicator of God's leading; yet circumstances should never be our primary, let alone sole, indicator of God's will. It requires a delicate balance to determine when the financial conditions contribute to direction and when they merely hinder it. Occasionally, God will speak clearly and wait for you to put in your two cents (widow's mites), then he responds with an abundance. After all, the essence of faith is hearing God's voice and being obedient to what he tells you to do, and that's what vision is really all about.