The Wrong Time!

Leola sits in the front window dreaming about being on a ranch, in the Southern United States, riding horses and working the ranch. She has had this dream since she was a child but it has never come to pass. She thinks she was too lazy to go after it or too uninvolved in her own life to actual make it come true maybe simply side tracked. She was born in the wrong time, in the wrong city to the wrong parents. She just feels like her whole life is just wrong. Her vacations reflect country life with streams of rushing clean water and her mind is always going to country living. She dreams of redecorating her house to look like a country cabin. Her dreams of the Life Skills Center are all inside a country house with a wrap around porch for the women to have alone time and swing their cares away. The laziness and the work of it all draws her attention. She sees someone riding a horse and she is off daydreaming about doing it herself yet she has only ridden a horse twice. She loves to watch movies about ranches and horses. Oh, how she wishes she were born down South one hundred years ago.

When Leola was reading romance novels she would always choose the westerns. Her dream was not only to be born during that time but also to be married to a rancher. They would struggle together to make it work and it would flourish. “How childish,” she thought, “to have this dream still!” Sam, her husband, is aware of this dream because they discussed what they thought they would be when they grew up. She loves to watch the westerns from the fifties and sixties with Sam. He wasn’t shocked about her dream because his dreams were just as wild. Leola knows most people dream of a life when they are children but don’t see it come to fruition as an adult. Some are just too extravagant, some to wild and some are just plain impossible. Sam and Leola dreamed the impossible for the time they lived in and the people they were. One of the things they had in common is a love of the country so they vacation in the country. She has the best of both worlds where they live and she is happy but she still pines every now and then for what could have been. Or could it have been? God will show her she is useful in this era!

God’s timing is so frustrating for most of us. He takes people from us to soon, He moves us to other pastures to late, His plan looks like it makes no sense some times, He doesn’t bring us what we need when we think we need it and He makes us live in a time we feel uncomfortable living in. We feel useless because we are doing nothing we deem important. If we could just be in this time what we had to do would be important. It would be time consuming and we wouldn’t have to dream about being productive because we would be. We are waiting on a God we don’t expect the expected from. We have experienced the unexpected and we don’t like it. Solomon tells us He has made everything beautiful in its time even if we feel out of place and awkward we are in our time. As long as we remain in the dream of other times we will not see the beauty in our time. God will put a dream of eternity in our heart that will satisfy us but still we will question because we cannot know the work that God does from beginning to end.

The Right Time!

Still staring out the window God begins to point out the beauty in her world today, right now! All the things she loves today were not even a glimmer in the eyes of the inventors one hundred years ago. God had created her for this time because He wanted her to follow His plan for this moment in history. She is not living in the past nor is she living in the future she is living today and today is where God wants her. It is frightening to give up the dream she has had for so many years. It gave her comfort but it also caused her sorrow for what she didn’t have. There is nothing now. No dream of a ranch, no dream of horses, no dream of a house on rolling hills with a view of a running stream. Her feeling of being useless is overwhelming her. What is to work for? No future images to look forward too. Leola will spend a good six months with no future dream and no goals to go with it. God waited for her to be completely stripped of that time then He went to work. God brought her to Revelation where she discovered the dream she should have. The New Earth and the New Jerusalem are her dream now. She wonders about it and has great joy thinking about it. The God she so longs to be with will be there. Jesus has put a great dream in her head and it will be hers in the right time!

Scripture tells us we are to be eternity minded to see Jesus. If we continue to allow our mind to wander into our time and our space alone He can not be found. He is our future as Christians. He is in the right time with the Father and speaking to us through the Holy Spirit. In the Fathers time He will bring us into the future to a beauty we cannot even fathom but He did give us clues in Revelation about what the New Jerusalem will look like. I want to be there, do you? The time is eternity, the time is right!

Meditation Verses: Ecclesiastes 3:11; Revelation 21; 22