The older I get the more I begin to understand having a “vision”or dream or goal (whatever you want to call it) for your life.  Like I have said before, when you grow up in the church or spend a lot of time in the church you get accustomed to certain churchy words like vision and calling but I don’t thing that most people truly know what they mean.  I know I didn’t, I kind of understood the concept, but I didn’t have a full understanding or personal knowledge of these concepts.  I believe this is why having a mentor or small group of people that you learn from is so important.  It isn’t until we have a personal experience or something happens in our life that gives us understanding that we can understand the meaning of some of these terms.

For me I have recently realized how important vision casting is for individuals as well as for teams.  I have heard about it before and knew that it was important, but I had not had a personal experience with the concept.  I was recently reminded of a dream that I had several years back.  I have not kept this dream or vision in front of me and it slowly slipped away.  Thank God that I have realized that.

In Blue Like Jazz, Miller says something to the effect of, it is not the enemy’s plan to try to get us to commit some great sin, he just tries to keep us distracted and/or busy.  I think this is a true thing.  The devil can not make us do anything.  However, I still think it is funny to hear people say, “The devil made me do it.”  There may be some people that actually hear from the devil, like Charles Manson or Jeffery Dahmur, but for the rest of us, we do things on our own.  As Christians we often times find ourselves way off course, feeling distant from God and like their dreams and goals are unachievable and doing things we thought we would never do.  Almost every time if we trace it back to the beginning, of the veer off course, we will find that there wasn’t any big change, just little distractions.  One after another, little changes in direction.  Next thing we know we are way out in the middle of no where, but we were so busy or distracted that we never took time to be quiet with God for even a few minutes to make sure we were still on the right track.

We must be ever vigilant (or always paying attention) to what we are doing.  To put it simply, we must live on purpose, not always allowing life to just happen to us.  With God’s help we can be whoever we want to be and do whatever it is we want to do.  We just have to keep that always before us.