Is your dream as dried up as a "raisin in the sun'?

 My journal entry for May 2005 included this verse from Psalm 71: I will come with the mighty deeds of the Lord God. I will make mention of Thy righteousness, Thine alone. And even when I am old and gray O God, do not forsake me, until I declare Thy strength to this generation, Thy power to all who are to come.

My prayer following this entry was, “Lord, I love to speak publicly and I desire to write a book. Both require having something to say! I offer this “loaf and fish” unto you. I open my mouth and ask you to fill it.”

Today, June 2013, eight years later, I did a radio interview with Lynne Ford at WBCL Indiana about Call of a Coward-The God of Moses and the Middle-Class Housewife. The book I ended up writing years after the seed of desire was planted in my heart. Back in 2005, I was totally unaware of the path that was opening before me: a book written and published without my ever writing a book proposal. (Thank you God!)

But as I was praying before the interview, I thought of how often I’d heard Satan was the prince of the power of the air. For a fleeting moment a flicker of fear passed through me. Later, as radio host Lynne and I prayed together, I bowed in amazement at the power of the God we serve. Two Christian women, unknown to each other, but connected over the radio waves to proclaim the mighty deeds of the Lord. What had I to fear.

I look back over the past few years and wonder how I could worry my time for usefulness has passed. I marvel at the times I let hope leak out of me like air in saggy pool float, or let fear dismantle a dream.

It’s easy to feel confidence in retrospect. And yet it’s so human to lose the mountain vision down in the shadowy valley, where as the psalmist says, sadness and despair can make us think God has left us:  “it is my grief that the right hand of the Most High has changed.”—Psalm 77:10

Today as I celebrate the deeds of the unchanging Lord in my life and in the lives of his people, I think of you who feel your dreams have “dried up like a raisin in the sun,” as Langston Hughes writes.  You who are in the middle of a chapter that doesn't look as though it is going to have a good ending.

I want to encourage you with a prayer from Ephesians, but it’s hard to choose one because I have so many underlined in my Bible. Let me piece one together for you:

Father, you tell us to remember, but we forget. You tell us you are, and we worry you can’t. We don’t want to dish your word out like candy to a crying babe. We want to speak it for what it is—the word of God, which performs its work in us who believe.—1 Thess. 2:13

May we remember we are your workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which you prepared beforehand that we should walk in them. We ask to know the love of Christ, which surpasses knowledge that we may be filled up to all the fullness of God. And that the eyes of our hearts would be enlightened, so that we may know what is the hope of your calling, what are the riches of the glory of your inheritance in the saints, and what is the surpassing greatness of your power to us who believe.

(Eph 2:10, 3:19,1:18)

Blessings abundant friends. May you pick up that dream and offer it to the Lord,

Marcia