Thought 1: Sailing

When you create a dream in your mind and begin to formulate ways that your dream could potentially happen, you have no idea what the result will be. This happens over and over again through our lives. You make choices, create ideas, and formulate plans without knowing for sure what the result will be.

When ships set sail into the ocean, their captains are unaware of the exact condition of the sea. They certainly know some information, such as where they want to go, why they want to be there, and they can probably estimate how long they will be at sea depending on how fast they travel. They have a few things under control, like the food they eat and the amount of food they need to save in order to remain nourished throughout the whole voyage. They can control the ship’s wheel, allowing themselves to continue heading in the direction they want to go. Despite the given information a captain obtains before setting sail, they are still choosing to go knowing that literally anything could happen to their ship. The ocean is unpredictable, but sailors are determined to overcome unpredictability. In fact, because they have somewhere they want to go, they don’t let anything make them think that they cannot travel successfully. Sailors have accurate expectations of the sea.
I think we can learn a lot from sailors. Like the sailor, we don’t really know what our lives will look like come a few years. We know some information, like where we want to go and why we want to be there, and how long we will be working to get there. We don’t have the future under control. God does. What we have under control is how much we want something and how much we are going to do to get from A to Z. We can control what we do to get to where we want to be.

Good friends of mine know a lot about sailors, because they are actually learning how to become sailors for a living. A while ago, God put a dream in their hearts to build a boat, set sail, and tell people in different countries around the world about Jesus. This was several years ago. The only practical way for them to be able to set sail with their ship and make it a home for their family was to build it near water. So they decided to build their ship in North Carolina, where transporting the ship to water would be easy. Then they could set sail and travel around the world and tell as many people as they can about the love of Jesus. This dream is beautiful, but Satan hates it. In fact, he has tried to stop them from executing their dream by allowing many severe storms to destroy and temporarily prohibit the construction of their ship. Regardless of the many obstacles that have arisen during their construction time, they continue to build, and even rebuild the ship. This dream is obviously worth it to them, because they stepped into it knowing there would be obstacles outside of their control. They knew in the very beginning that they could expect storms, and they wouldn’t be able to control the storms. They knew there could be disasters, and because they were following what Jesus asked them to do, Satan would try to stop them. This never made them question their God-given dreams. Now, three or four years later, they are still building, knowing that one day, God will open the door for them to finish the project completely. Then, when the ship is done being built, they will be able to see their dream come to life and flourish, because they are trusting in what God asked them to do and in the predictability of God’s power and faithfulness.

I think one of Jesus’ dreams was to pour into and mentor his twelve disciples. They were like his best friends, and he desired to serve them so that they could know the best way to live their lives. Some of those guys didn’t fulfill their roles as disciples until Jesus left earth. This was because they needed time to learn and grow and watch Jesus so that they could imitate him with their whole hearts and lives. Jesus was patient, and more than that, he refused to give up on them because he loved them, and his dream of pouring into them was worth it.

All over the Bible there are stories of people who have great big dreams and who want to see their dreams actually happen. Sarah, an old woman who was no longer able to give birth, had a dream and hope that she would one day have a child. God was in favor of her dream; he was all for it. She doubted God’s ability to see her dream through. This is how we are a lot of times. We have a dream, and because it takes so long to happen, we get discouraged and believe lies about God that we shouldn’t: God isn’t good enough; he doesn’t care. It goes like this:

Because our dreams are unpredictable, we decide to give them to God. When it seems like God is failing to multiply what we gave him, or even to make those dreams happen, we decide we can’t trust him, and we turn away from the Dream Maker himself. This is dangerous. Just because a dream is unpredictable and we aren’t certain of what may happen, doesn’t mean we should draw unnecessary conclusions about who God is. God knows our dreams, and is desperate to help our dreams come true. What he is doing is being sure that we are making choices to guide us to what we want to do the most. I think a lot of what God does is help us build our ships so we can eventually set sail. This means God is continuously checking in with our hearts and coming close to them so we don’t stray from the path leading us to our dreams. It also means we have to be willing to let God make some important moves in our lives, even life altering or life changing moves, so that we can keep moving forward. We have to be willing to be obedient to what God asks us to do, even if it requires letting him bring a ship-destroying storm. God only does big, scary things in our lives so that we can grow into something that looks more and more like him.

I think God wants us to embrace and find freedom in unpredictability, because, much like in battle, we decide to raise our white flags and let him take control of the only thing we have some control over; the wheel. There is a song that talks about letting Jesus take the wheel. I think we should listen to it. And I think the songwriter wrote it because they wanted us to understand the certainty and predictability of God. I think we should let God bust down our walls and take over in the areas we are most protective over; like our dreams. We are protective of them because we don’t really know what will happen and what the end result of our ship- construction will be. We are afraid. That’s why we have a hard time letting him take over.

If you feel stuck, like you don’t know where you should head with your dreams, you should get to the root of things. In this case, because of uncertainty, it may be that you have fear that you haven’t ever told someone about, and because of that, anxiety has been building up in your life. It might be time to talk about your fear, so that you can keep moving forward and learn that unpredictability and uncertainty aren’t bad things. Instead, they take us on the journey of trusting more and more in who Jesus says he is. If Jesus says he is trustworthy, we can trust him. If he says he is with you, he is with you. What Jesus says is what he means to say. And he might be challenging you to make sure your expectations of the sea are where they are supposed to be. If they aren’t where they are supposed to be, he may be pushing you to either raise or lower the bar. If they are, he may be asking you to be bolder, to keep building your ship even if hurricanes come. And you might find, all along, the storm is actually the thing that got you from A to Z.