Last week I spent a long weekend alone in the city of Prague. As I was walking back from the city center to my hostel one afternoon, I took some time to listen to a sermon from Elevation Church*. In this particular sermon, Stephen Furnick spoke about dreams and more specifically about the danger of a dream. There were multiple good points he spoke about, but one in particular that I would like to share my thoughts on.
In this sermon, Furnick looked at the story of Joseph, starting in Genesis chapter 37. When Joseph was just seventeen years old, he had a dream. A dream that pointed to his eleven brothers bowing down for him. As Joseph was his father’s favorite son, his brothers already didn’t like him. When he told them about his dream, they liked him even less and decided to get rid of him. They plotted to kill him, but decided they would rather sell him as a slave so they could get some money out of him. That is how Joseph started his journey to Egypt.
Joseph didn’t ask for a dream, but God gave him one. In the years that followed, Joseph was a slave and prisoner in Egypt. He never tried to pursue his dream. Instead, he pursued God. Joseph’s life in Egypt came with a lot of ups and downs, but through all of his story in Genesis, you can read that God was with him. Joseph didn’t follow his dream, he followed God, after which his dreams followed him. God eventually brought him in a position where Pharaoh put him in charge of all of Egypt.
Joseph had forgotten about the dreams he had when he was seventeen, until a famine came to Egypt and the surrounding nations. Joseph had spent the seven years previously collecting as much food as possible for the famine he knew was coming, so his brothers were sent by their father to go to Egypt to buy grain. Joseph was still in charge of distributing the food and when his brothers bowed down before him, he remembered the dream he had had thirteen years earlier. It was different from what he had seen back then, less shiny for sure. But it had come back to him and here he was, in the middle of his dream.
As I was listening and taking notes on this sermon, God brought something back to my mind. He reminded me of when I first dreamed of taking a gap year, early on in high school. I wanted to travel the world, meet new people, get to know new countries and cultures. I planned it out completely. I would spend around two weeks in one country, giving me the time to see all the highlight, and then move on to the next country, visiting as many as I could in a few months. It never happened that way, but I realize now that God used that desire of my heart to travel and used it for His glory. He gave me chances to travel the world, but in a different way.
In my first blogpost I told you all about living in Germany for three months and in my previous post I shared with you that I will be going back to Mercy Ships for three months in 2020. There is a four month gap between these two trips and naturally I assumed that I would spend those four months at home in the Netherlands, hopefully working at a local restaurant. But God gave me another chance to travel. As you can read in my first post, I am staying in a host family here in Germany. It was my host mom who pointed out a bigger volunteer program within YWAM. I did some research and found out about ‘Kokua Crew’, a volunteer program within YWAM Kona, Hawaii. YWAM Kona is the biggest YWAM base worldwide and they need a lot of volunteers to keep the base running. You can serve with the Kokua Crew for certain periods of time and one of them fitted perfectly between my plans for Germany and Mercy Ships. I applied, got accepted and booked my flights within three days and at the end of December, I will fly to Hawaii for three months of volunteering.
My life seems crazy to me sometimes. I am not traveling to a new country every two weeks, but instead I get to spend multiple months in one country. I have found that this is so much richer, because I can really get to know the culture and build relationships with the people I meet. God reminded me of my dream back in high school and showed me that I am living part of that dream, but that He made it to be a better one. Through my travels I not only get to meet new people, countries and cultures, but I also get to experience something else. I get to meet Him, Jesus, and I get to know the culture of His Kingdom.
Just like with Joseph, the dream I’m living now looks nothing like the one I first had. It is less shiny, but this version of it is so much better. I wonder if Joseph would agree with me, but I think he would.
This is the dream. To know Him. To love Him. To serve Him.
*If you are interested in the sermons from Elevation Church you can find them here: https://open.spotify.com/show/6nLlNUMm4VuZE1ln9oOJvy
The one I listened to is called 'The Danger of a Dream' and was posted on April 7th 2019.
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