What to Do When Your Dream is Stuck
4 Steps to Help You Deal with Effort but Little Results
Timing Matters….A Lot
Sometimes by God’s design, we are in circumstances that do not yet allow us to take the Promised Land of Purpose.
Israel was in slavery for four-hundred years and then, by God’s plan, for two years in the desert. If you don’t remember, God told Abraham that his descendants would be in captivity for 400 years; many years before it actually happened. Then they would come back and live in this Promised Land.
Trying to take the Promised Land during those 402 years would not have worked because it was not yet God’s time for them; there were factors regarding the people in the Promised Land that still had to be worked out. Plus, God was using Israel as an eternal lesson of how He takes us from slavery into freedom for people everywhere.
God dreams are rarely accompanied by known timelines; from our vantage point, anyway. God knows, but it’s rare He tells us when the dream will be fulfilled.
What if, that waiting time you go through, will be used by God as part of your story to help other people? How many of us are encouraged by Abraham’s difficult journey of waiting 20 years to receive the promised heir of promise?
Some of the delay’s we go through are not only to develop some aspect of faith and character in us; they are also to help us more effectively do the main work God has planned for us to do with greater impact.
What should you do if you have a God-given dream of leading a healthy business, ministry, or family, but you are figuratively in prison, needing to do a job you hate to put food on the table? Or you are at a stage in life where you must be home to raise your children, and even though that is a high calling, you have dreams of doing more?
4 Steps To Take
- Remember, you can always do something.
It might need to be purely spiritual or internal, but you can do something.
Viktor Frankl said when he was in a Nazi concentration camp, the Nazi’s did everything in their power to beat down and humiliate the prisoners. But Frankl realized the Nazi’s could not take away his thoughts. He could control them.
So he chose to think about reasons to live, a purpose. He did something, even in the harshest slave situations imaginable. When he was finally liberated, he wrote one of the best sellers of all time and became world-renowned for his teaching on the power of purpose.
2. Be faithful with what you know to do and with what you already have.
Do the best you can with what God has already given you. Assess what you do have, even if it’s very small or purely internal. Then ask God to help you know how to make the most of it.
Even if all you can do is take one step internally, externally, or both each day in the direction of your dream, that is progress. And at some point, either those little steps will add up and get you there, or they will lead you to a platform for a big jump forward.
Jesus said if we are faithful then we will be faithful with much.
It is so easy to complain about what we don’t yet have rather than to focus on and develop what we DO have.
What is one step you can take today, even if it’s purely mental, that will move your towards your purpose?
3. Strengthen your faith by thanking and praising God for His word and His nature.
Almost everything in God’s kingdom happens through some expression of faith and love.
Thanksgiving, praise, worship, and God’s words keep the connection with God strong and responsive. Thank Him that His words are true and praise Him for His faithfulness, even when things seem immovable.
At some point God will change the circumstances or He will have changed you enough that He uses you to change them.
4. Commit to trusting God over the long haul.
Remember, every single person God uses in a powerful way has gone through seasons, sometimes long seasons, of preparation. There are simply no overnight successes in long-term purposes.
All of us go through times of waiting, just guard against letting waiting produce passivity and loss of hope.
We inherit God’s promises by a combination of faith and patience; not doubt and despair.
God never tells us to deny the reality of our current situation; He instead tells us to trust that He is greater than reality and is faithful to all He has promised. Look at Abraham’s example, and realize Abraham is the human/spiritual father of all of us who believe in Jesus:
“Without becoming weak in faith, he contemplated his own body, now as good as dead since he was about a hundred years old and the deadness of Sarah’s womb; yet with respect to the promise of God, he did not waver in unbelief but grew strong in faith, giving glory to God and being fully assured that what God had promised He was able also to perform.” Romans 4:19–21
Read those verses a few times a day when going through those seasons of tire spinning and wall viewing.
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