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    Do You Have the Courage to Pursue Your Dream?

     

    Have you ever had a goal, a dream, that somehow faded into the background of your story? Life with its baggage and responsibilities elbowed its way to the center, eating up your time and opportunities.

    Choices write our stories. Perhaps your choices, good and bad, have led you away from pursuing your dream. Perhaps you think they’ve ended it.

    Moses was trained as a leader. As the adopted son of the Pharaoh’s daughter, he was educated as a prince in the royal Egyptian court. At forty, he had an awakening. His desire was to free his people, the Hebrews, from slavery. But he made two choices that seemed to seal his fate. The first was not understanding the Hebrew God’s rules of engagement which is ask for direction, and then carry that out exactly as prescribed. The second was charging ahead with his plan without realizing the effect this plan would produce.

    They were choices that seemed to end his dream. God had placed him in the house of Pharaoh. Moses put himself in the desert. For the next forty years, he lived in obscurity as a shepherd, tending flocks and raising a family. The flocks weren’t even his. The pride of Pharaoh’s daughter, the cherished son of a Hebrew slave woman, was a regular guy with a mundane job.

    Abraham was living in Ur in relative ease with his dad, his nephew and his wife. He had one desire: to raise a family. Instead, God sent him on a journey. For decades he obeyed whatever God told him to do. He became so successful and rich the people in the lands he traveled envied him. But he and his wife still had no children so there was no son to inherit any of it. His desire became a sorrow. He too tried to hurry  along God’s promise of a son. He figured out his own plan, but it ended in disaster. He was almost a hundred years old, his wife almost ninety. Their opportunity for raising a family had passed.

    Both men settled into defeat. They adjusted to their circumstances and the reality of an unfulfilled dream.

    It was at this time that God placed their dreams in front of them again. Time, age, obscurity, these were not obstacles to God. They were to men with common sense, but our God is not common and not bound by what man decrees possible. He works according to His laws in His Kingdom.

    Heavenly visitors came to Abraham and Sarah and announced that a son would be born to them. They named their son laughter, and their sorrow turned to joy. Abraham is now the father of nations.

    Moses was eighty when God appeared to him. Moses was a humble shepherd with a shepherd’s staff in his hand when God told him to go back to Egypt and speak to the Pharaoh on behalf of the Hebrews. Genesis 46:34 tells us that shepherds were detested in Egypt. Moses was no longer the bold, dignified prince. Those who had known him before would have laughed in his face.

    “What is that in your hand?” God asked Moses. (Exodus 4:2)


    I know, Moses may have thought. I am just a shepherd now. I will be ridiculous to them. But he answered, “A staff.”


    That staff, the symbolic sign of a shepherd, would become the instrument of the miraculous. With it Moses made a snake appear, turned a river into blood, parted the Red Sea, provided water for thirsty thousands out of a rock and won a war. What Moses saw as the ultimate humiliation in the eyes of the Egyptians, God made an object of honor. 

    Where does that leave us? Lamenting over the could’ve-should’ves? Not necessarily. What do you have in your hand? “For with God nothing shall be impossible.” (Luke 1:37)  Notice that important word with.  Is it time to try again? Do you have the courage to pursue your dream? Only you can answer, but, anything is possible to him that believes. (Mark 9:23)

     

    What dream would you like to pursue? We'd love for you to share it, and we would love even more to agree with you in prayer to see it fulfilled.

     

     

    Image courtesy of Pixabay

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