SEEING the future.

I realized something as I thought about yesterdays post concerning my "passion".
I mentioned that the missional living hadn't really panned out as we'd imagined it because someone in the house didn't like strangers. But that's not the entire story. I don't know about anyone elses reasons, but I know that I simply had the idea that missional living was a good thing.

I had ideas of what missional living involved and what I could do to begin ministering.

But in the last couple of weeks I've had a vision of missional living.

The difference between the two is that I have a picture in my head now of exactly what my goal looks like.

There's nothing wrong with ideas. Let me say that I'm "ideas" biggest fan. I love the unusual and creative, the inventive and thoughtful. Change, not for changes sake, but for betterments sake. Ideas are wonderful.

But admittedly, sometimes I have ideas that I don't understand how to implement. I don't quite see exactly what they look like in production and often my methods go awry.

But a vision is a bird of a totally different color. At least for me anyway. Perhaps I'm just a bit too dim-witted for ideas to pull me through.
The vision though was just simply a picture of things that I already did, and how it would allow missional living to succeed. It gave me a picture of who I could reach out to. It told me where to do it. It told me what I would use to do it - and ironically enough it was the exact same method Jesus used quite often.
That takes care of who, what, when, where, how - and I already know the why.

Back in June when I moved here I wouldn't have been able to carry this off. But now that I've seen it - I'm anxious to begin scaring myself with the possibilities of it.

Have you ever seen your ideas before you began them?