I don't know if any of you have ever heard of Joyce Meyer-I hadn't really listened to her or read any of her books (she has like a BILLION of them!) but what Melissa showed me last night really spoke to me. Assuming I can figure out how to do it, I'll post the link right here:
Ok, so you can check it out for yourself if you'd like-the whole video is really good, but it's starting at about 15:13 that really spoke to me. Just before this, she uses the illustration of John 21, when Peter decides to go out and go fishing, and 6 of the other disciples go with him. They fish all night and don't catch a thing, and in the morning Jesus comes (but they don't know it's Him) and tells them to cast the net off the right side of the boat. They catch so many fish they can't reel them in!
Joyce says that sometimes being out of God's timing means being out of His will, that you can know (or think you know) what God wants you to do, but act in your emotions without waiting for His timing and still have it not work out. And this is frustrating (oh, yes, is it frustrating!) because deep down, we know it's His will, and we don't understand, and we can't figure it out.
She says that having a dream or a vision of God's is like being pregnant with something, and you don't want to have a premature birth or a spiritual abortion of this dream, do you? You don't just want to throw it away because you're not willing to wait!
Our timing isn't His timing, and our ways aren't His ways. If anything, I feel like I should have gone to the Dominican Republic last year rather than this year. My Spanish is so much better-I can carry out conversations with native speakers and not have to ask them to slow down, and I've been told by a friend that he can understand me as well, like a native-speaker. I have this desire to go and reach people-I'm even starting to consider missions someday, but what good does any of this do me if I act prematurely and outside of God's timing?
I have no idea what God is going to have me do with all of this money, or with the month and a half that I have off from school starting in two weeks. I can't stand not doing anything, so I pray that He shows me something to do, whether it be outreaching in Spanish somehow or someone who needs me to minister to them in English. Maybe He's having me wait because I am so focused on the Spanish-speaking world right now. Maybe I need to learn to minister to people in my own backyard, in my own language, first.
I hope that anyone who reads this and has a dream or a vision that is being put off realizes that this doesn't mean "no" forever, and that it's better to wait until the dream is mature than to do it on our own. I'm not the most patient of people, and that's something I've noticed God teaching me over the past couple of years as well, something that I am (unfortunately) still learning. I wouldn't mind the waiting if I knew why I was waiting, but that's part of the process, too. Faith doesn't mean understanding all the time, but trusting all the time.
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