The Prodigal Believer

Someone once said that art is a reflection of life. The movie “Cast Away” in some sense reveals an aspect of life we all find ourselves in at times. In the movie, Tom Hanks’ character finds himself on an island in the south pacific after the plane he was traveling in crashes during a thunder storm. Hanks character is the only one to survive the crash and he is marooned on the island for five years. Ultimately, Hanks gets off the island and returns home where he has a hard time dealing with all that has occurred in his absence. At a pivotal point in the movie, Hanks is sitting in the living room of a good friend late one night. He begins to tell his friend all that he endured and experienced while he was marooned, including an attempt to take his own life. After he tells his friend the story about the failed suicide attempt he says, “I had power over *nothing*. And that’s when this feeling came over me like a warm blanket. I knew, somehow, that I had to stay alive. Somehow, I had to keep breathing. Even though there was no reason to hope. And all my logic said that I would never see this place again. So that’s what I did. I stayed alive. I kept breathing. And one day my logic was proven all wrong because the tide came in, and gave me a sail. And now, here I am. I’m back, in Memphis, talking to you. I have ice in my glass…And I know what I have to do now. I gotta keep breathing. Because tomorrow the sun will rise. Who knows what the tide could bring?”

As believers we sometimes find ourselves marooned on our journey towards our big dream. Through a series of unanticipated events or just the grind of the daily routine, we come to feel like we are on hold and do not appear to be moving forward towards what the Lord has for us. These “on hold times” seem to stretch from days into weeks then into months and sometimes even into years without any significant noticeable movement. It is during these “marooned” times that we need to continue to show up each day. Though we may not see it or feel it, since the day the Lord gave us the dream, He has not once ever stopped working on fulfilling the dream. This means that every day we need to “breath” in the presence of God into our lives so that we will know what the Lord wants us to do for that day. We ultimately need to come to the point in our lives where, no matter what we are faced with or how long the journey may take, we will declare “My mouth is filled with your praise, declaring your splendor all day long” Psalm 71:8 (NIV). We need to show up each day so we can see “what the tide has brought in” from the Lord.

Joseph was a prodigal believer in that he showed up each and every day carrying out what the Lord had laid out before him to do that day. For thirteen years, Joseph showed up every day and carried out what the Lord had for him to do. From the age of seventeen to the age of thirty, He worked at whatever task or assignment that day held for him. There is no indication; beginning in Genesis chapter 37 to the end of the book, that Joseph ever took a day off from what the Lord had for him. No matter how difficult, boring, long, or tedious the day may have been, at no time do we see Joseph giving up on the dream the Lord had given to him. Even when it seemed that he had been forgotten and would labor forever in the prison, we still see Joseph showing up doing his job. Joseph had securely established in his life the contentment that the Apostle Paul reflects upon in Philippians 4:11-13, “Actually, I don’t have a sense of needing anything personally. I’ve learned by now to be quite content whatever my circumstances. I’m just as happy with little as with much, with much as with little. I’ve found the recipe for being happy whether full or hungry, hands full or hands empty. Whatever I have, wherever I am, I can make it through anything in the One who makes me who I am.” (The Message)

Big Dreams require that we show up every day ready for whatever the Lord has for us that day. There are many ways we can show up ready each day for what the Lord has in store for us. We can show up with a joyful attitude by starting each day praising God for what He has already done and for how far He has already brought us in the journey. We can show up each day by taking time during the day to thank the Lord for what He has shown us about who He is and what He can do. We can show up each day by continuing the preparation process that began the day the big dream was given. There are things we need to know and people we need to meet that prepare us for the time when the big dream arrives. We can also show up each day by calling to mind the promises found in His word such as the promise found in Philippians 4:19 “and my God will meet all your needs according to his glorious riches in Christ Jesus.” (NIV)

Another way we show up every day is when our disposition is one of expectancy. B y this I mean we are to live each day expecting the Lord to speak or act. When we live a life of expectancy then we will approach life in a way where we take each day one day at a time and avoid the temptation to look at tomorrow too closely. While we wait on the Lord to fulfill the dream we are tempted to look at tomorrow too closely and our minds become overwhelmed with all that needs to take place for the dream to occur. When we begin to dwell on all the massive undertaking that is required for our dream to become a reality our inclination is to shut down mentally. When this happens the sheer size of the dream causes us to become discouraged. This in turn causes us to lose the expectancy that once kept us going. We are then prone to put life on hold and, when we do that, we run the risk of losing sight of the dream altogether.

One of the ways we put life on hold is by focusing upon what seems to be falling down or coming apart all around us. The everyday trials and troubles have a way of growing bigger than they really are when things do not seem to move fast enough. This causes us to go into survival mode where we shut down everything that might cost money or take time away from making things happen. We, in some sense, cease to function spiritually, mentally and emotionally.

There was a time where I found myself dropping into survival mode and putting life on hold while waiting on the Lord to open up a job where I lived. At the time, I was working a job that required me to be away from home three to four weeks at a time and only being home three or four days in between. During this time, I missed all but one soccer game of my oldest son’s junior year and missed all of the cross country meets of my younger son’s seventh grade. I missed out on holding my wife’s hand and sitting and talking with her on the couch. It was like a big gapping black hole had erupted in my life and everything had been sucked in. Every day all I could think about was what I was missing and just getting each day over with so the weeks would go by faster. I had dropped into survival mode and had completely put life on hold mentally, spiritually, and emotionally. My putting life on hold had so gotten to the point that, while I was away from home working, I would literally just sleep, work, eat and sleep. Praise the Lord that He got a hold of me and pulled me out of this dangerous tail spin and got me back on track with where he wanted me to go. One way we can avoid putting life on hold is by taking hold of the words of Paul, as our own, where he says, “So we’re not giving up. How could we! Even though on the outside it often looks like things are falling apart on us, on the inside, where God is making new life, not a day goes by without his unfolding grace.” 2 Corinthians 4:16 (The Message)

It is my belief, though, that the best way we can show up every day is by renewing our attitude of dependence upon the Lord and dropping any attitude of self-sufficiency and pride. The attitude of self-sufficiency and pride says, “well the Lord is not moving fast enough for me so I’ll make things happen on my own”. When we take the “self-sufficiency” route on the big dream journey we will always run into a major obstacle. The particular obstacle that we will run into is an extension or a slowing down of the journey. We are faced with this obstacle because the Lord has to take time away from moving the dream forward to take the time to get us back on track. What I mean by Him getting us “back on track” is this. One of the major aspects of the journey towards the big dream is what we learn along the way about whom God is and what He wants to build within us. When we decide to “lay our own tracks” we are saying that our way of accomplishing a dream is better than any way God could do it. This in effect means we are telling God to step aside and let us drive the train. The reality of this action is that we begin to take the place of God which in practice is idolatry. In this instance, we place our self-sufficiency and pride before God and anything that comes before God is an idol.

In addition to committing idolatry, we are saying that we know everything there is to know about God and in fact we probably can teach Him a thing or two about who He is. We are saying that there is nothing new that we need to learn about God that we have not already read in the Bible or we have heard Chuck Swindol, Greg Laurie, Chip Ingram or David Jeremiah teach. We are also declaring that there is nothing about our self or our lives that needs changing or improving. We are the total package complete in every way capable of understanding all mysteries and are knowledgeable of how to handle every situation we might face. In other words we have become like God in that we know everything or to use a theological term we are omniscient. This is quite a declaration of independence that even all the 56 signers of our nation’s Declaration of Independence would not dare proclaim. In fact they declared that they held “a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence”.

The self-sufficiency and pride approach will eventually lead us back to where we first started which is being frustrated. We were frustrated that God was not moving fast enough and after we wonder around a bit we end up becoming frustrated because we cannot seem to make things happen. Our approach instead needs to be one where we show up every day with an attitude of dependence that says “Lord show me what I need to know about you today and what you want to change in my life so I can move forward in my journey towards the dream you have given me.”

We avoid the temptation to declare self-sufficiency when we take the time to memorize scripture like “Quiet down before God, be prayerful before him. Don’t bother with those who climb the ladder, who elbow their way to the top.” Psalm 37:7 (The Message). It is through the word of God that we gain the strength to show up each day ready for what He has for us and it keeps us moving along the path towards the fulfillment of the big dream.

When I was younger, as a family, we would spend several weeks in the summer visiting my grandparents in Hope, Arkansas.  I was fortunate to not only have both sets of my grandparents living in the same city but they also lived across the street from each other.  While at our grandparents, my brothers and I would climb pecan trees, build forts in the blackberry bushes, walk down the railroad tracks collecting railroad tie spikes, build tepees, swing on the porch swing, climb on the roof of the garage, wait for the ice cream truck come by so we could buy a nickel ice cream cone, and go fishing in Luck’s pond.

My brothers and I looked forward to our Dad loading up the fishing poles in the back seat of the car with the tips of the poles sticking out the back window.   Daddy, David, Doug and I would pile into the car and head out to a roadside store where we would get our provisions of cold bottled Pop Colas, peanuts, peanut butter crackers, and moon pies.  We would also fill up our minnow bucket with crickets which we used for bait.  I often wondered why we called it a minnow bucket when we keep crickets in it.  Well we would then head down the road to Luck’s Farm while we ate our peanut butter crackers or moon pies and drank our Pop Cola with peanuts in it.  We were in hog heaven!  Once we got to Luck’s Farm we would spread out along the edge of the pond, put our crickets on our hooks, throw our lines into the water and wait for a big bass or a nice size perch to latch on.  Now this is where it got tough for me.  I have always had a hard time waiting on anything and this held true for fishing.  I would toss my line into the water, wait an hour (which was really 20 seconds) and reel my line back in to see if I had caught anything. I would forget that if I had caught a fish then my bobber would go under the water.  But anyway I would reel my line in so many times that the friction from the water would eventually rub the cricket off the hook.  There were probably times where in my impatience I snatched the cricket right out of a fish’s mouth just as it was about to take the bait.  Waiting is a tough thing for a kid and as I have grown older I have come to the conclusion that it does not get any easier as an adult.

Waiting is major part of life which I know is no big surprise to those who read these words.  By now, most all of us have figured out that we will spend a significant portion of our lives in the waiting room of life.  As I have thought about all the things a person has to wait on I realize that those things we wait on can be divided into three basic categories: things, other people, and ourselves.  The “things” that we wait on are all inanimate objects that seemingly have a significant amount of importance in our daily lives.  Some of these “things” that we are forced to waiting upon are the dishwasher as we wait for the dishes to get clean so we can put them away.  The dryer as we wait for the clothes we need to wear to dry.  Then there is waiting for the car to warm up on a cold day or the traffic light to change so we are not late to work.  And let us not forget the minutes that seem like hours as we wait for the internet to come up so we can log on to Facebook to see whose status had changed or check on our animals in Farmville.  It is amazing the amount of time we spend waiting on “things”.

Then there are those “other people” that cause us to have to wait.  As employees we have to wait on our boss or bosses to make a decision before we can do our job.  As parents, we wait on our kids to get out of bed in the morning or we wait on them to finish soccer, football, dance, or piano practice.  As wives you wait on your husband to speak more than two words and as husbands we wait on our wife to stop speaking her 40,000 words.  As customers we wait in line at the grocery store, fast food drive through, Walmart or Target, the gas station, the bank, etc.

Lastly there is “ourselves” which is a category of waiting that we do not really think much about when it comes to waiting.  For some people the waiting on “self” is not a long process where as others it is an extended and excruciating process.  There are various ways we wait on ourselves.  When we are young we wait to become older so we can do things like get a driver’s license, go on a date, stay at home alone, or stay out late.  When we become an adult we wait on whom to marry, when to buy a house, a job, the economy to get better, etc.  As we move into the twilight years of our lives we enter a whole new realm of waiting.  We wait on our legs to inch forward, our brains to catch up with conversations, our eyes to focus on the words, and our ears to hear what is being said.

It is no secret that we spend a large portion of our life “waiting” on things, people and ourselves.  Sometimes we have to wait for a short period of time like a few minutes or hours.  Other times we have to wait several days, weeks, or months.  Then there are those times when we have to wait several years or decades for something to happen.  These longer waiting periods are the ones that test our faith as Prodigal Believers.  It is in these extended periods of waiting where Big Dreams live and work.  It is in these extended seasons of waiting that we also tend to wear down and lose heart while waiting for the big dream to be fulfilled.  As we wait we have a tendency to lose sight of the fact that the foundation of waiting is built upon hope and trust.  We forget that the reason we wait is because we have “hope” in the Lord to make the big dream to take place.  We “trust” in the Lord that what we are on the right path moving towards the big dream that He has given us.  Without hope and trust there is nothing to wait for and there is no big dream to pursue.  Waiting on God to fulfill a dream is hard and exhausting but we must continue to persevere and move forward.

When we look at the life of Joseph we see that the dream he was waiting on consumed thirteen years of his life.   Joseph started his big dream journey at the age of seventeen and it was not fulfilled until he was thirty years of age.  He spent half his teenage years and of his twenty’s waiting upon God to make his dream a reality.  Joseph persevered through hard and exhausting times with no indication of ever giving up and calling it quits on his big dream.  In fact, what the scriptures show us is that Joseph continued to wait on God to fulfill the dream and bring it to reality.  Later in Joseph’s life we see the evident of Joseph’s patient persistence.  In Genesis 50:19-21, Joseph reveals his attitude about waiting on God when he says, “Joseph replied, “Don’t be afraid. Do I act for God?  Don’t you see, you planned evil against me but God used those same plans for my good, as you see all around you right now – life for many people.  Easy now, you have nothing to fear; I’ll take care of you and your children.” He reassured them, speaking with them heart-to-heart.” (The Message)   Joseph is confessing that God is in charge of all aspects of the dream from beginning to the end.  This includes all the waiting we do while God moves the dream along.

Waiting is a part of the Big Dream process as we wait on the Lord to fulfill the dream. According to Webster’s New World Dictionary the word “wait” is defined as “to remain until something happens, to be ready” and the word “waiting” as “the act of one that waits”.  To me this means that waiting is not a spectator sport.  Waiting requires my active participation and attention.  For me, to wait means that I believe that a particular action, event, or circumstance is going to occur.  My presupposition is that my waiting is built upon the foundation of hope and trust in the Lord that He will do what He has told me He will do.

In July of 1990 I spent 21 days in Western and Eastern Europe with one of my professors from Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary and seven other seminary students.  We traveled to Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia (now the Czech Republic and the Republic of Slovakia), and Poland.  While we were in Germany we had the opportunity to meet Wilhelm Pahls who is a Germany Evangelist.  Pahls is considered by many to be the “Billy Graham” of Germany.  His ministry has stretched all over Europe and into Russia where he has held thousands of evangelistic meetings.  At the time we meet Pahls his ministry had given out over 262,000 books about Jesus, 48,780 booklets on Christianity, and thousands of spiritual growth packets.  Even today at 73 years of age Wilhelm Pahls is actively engaged in carrying out the Big Dream God has given him.  But, in the words of Paul Harvey, “and now for the rest of the story”.

Wilhelm Pahls grew up in a small village in Germany where there lived only one Christian.  This Christian was a lady who for over thirty years would daily share her faith in Christ with every person she met.  She would pass out Christian tracts to people to read as well as spending hours praying for the salvation of the people in her village.  Her “Big Dream” was for God to save at least one person in her lifetime.  As Pahls grew older, he moved to a nearby village where he worked as a car mechanic and an office worker in an automobile plant.  At the age of 20, he accepted Christ after reading a Christian book titled “This is for You!” Excitedly, Pahls returned to the village where he grew up to tell his family of his decision but was met with disgust by his family over his decision.  He then sought out the lady who was the only Christian in the village and who had prayed for thirty years for just one convert.  Pahls wanted to let her know of his decision for Christ and that God had answered her prayer.  When Pahls arrived at her home he found that she had died two days after he had been saved.  This lady never knew that God had fulfilled her dream of one convert.  But what a convert it was.  Through this lady’s faithful prayers and trust in God to fulfill dreams, hundreds of thousands of people have come and continue to come to a personal saving relationship with Jesus.

I do not know what dream you are waiting on God to fulfill.  Nor do I know how difficult or precarious your situation is as you are waiting on God to come through.  What I do know is this, we can trust in the Lord to complete the dream He has given each of us.  He will also give us the strength and energy to withstand the waiting period as He moves us towards the fulfillment of the dream.  “He energizes those who get tired, gives fresh strength to dropouts.   For even young people tire and drop out, young folk in their prime stumble and fall.  But those who wait upon God get fresh strength. They spread their wings and soar like eagles, They run and don’t get tired, they walk and don’t lag behind.” Isaiah 40:29-31 (The Message)

As an additional parting thought, and at the risk of over spiritualizing or mystifying, I want to point out an interesting observation I have made.  When you study Hebrew numerology you discover that the number seven represents God.  The number seven, to the Hebrews, also represents completion or wholeness.  The word “waiting” is a seven letter word.  Is it not interesting that what we are “waiting” upon is for God to complete or bring to wholeness the Big Dream. This is just a thought to ponder while we are waiting on God to fulfill our Big Dreams.