Mom Heart Moments #204

It will come about after this that I will pour out My Spirit on all mankind; and your sons and daughters will prophesy, your old men will dream dreams, your young men will see visions.

EVEN AS A YOUNG CHILD, I was a passionate dreamer, always questioning, challenging, wondering, and developing into an idealist. I remember one of my relatives saying to me once, “You always try to find the weirdest things to do, and then you do them just to embarrass us.”

This nonconformity was evident when I became a deeply committed Christian in college. I shared my faith with anyone God brought my way. Later, I went on staff with Campus Crusade for Christ and had to raise support to go into missions in Communist Eastern Europe in the 1970s. I heard things like, “Oh my goodness, you are such a radical! Where do you come up with these strange ideas? There are plenty of nonbelievers in the United States. You don’t have to leave the country and become a missionary to be committed!”

Eventually, I married another “radical,” and we moved back overseas, where we dreamed of a different kind of discipleship for our own children, building them into godly leaders in our home, as we had been doing with others all over the world.

Finally, we made a faith step to leave the comfort of a job with insurance and a monthly check to start a ministry to families, going five years before we had a monthly salary. Over the next twenty years we started our own publishing business and hosted conferences, wrote books, moved several times, and sought to be stewards of the messages God put on our hearts.

What drove these dreams? I believe it was the Holy Spirit. It certainly wasn’t the voices surrounding us!

Avoid, at all costs, listening to peer pressure. Do not measure your spirituality by rules or formulas. Don’t live by arbitrary standards, but by faith in the living, active God. What dream is on your heart?