40. What to Do With a Vision That Hasn’t Happened Yet

You stopped saying it out loud. Not because you stopped believing it. Because you got tired of the look on people's faces when the evidence didn't match the declaration.

In Episode 40,  we open the Vision Arc of the Formation Trilogy by naming one of the most disorienting experiences in a life of faith: carrying a God-given vision when the conditions for it have not yet arrived. Drawing from Habakkuk 2:2, 2 Corinthians 4, and theologians Howard Thurman, Esau McCaulley, and Justo Gonzalez, this episode confronts the slow, subtle habit of negotiating your calling downward until it fits inside what is currently visible, and offers three concrete postures for staying faithful to what God placed on you in the in-between.

This episode is for the person who has been carrying something that has not landed yet and needs to hear that the waiting is not a mistake. It is where the formation happens.

Scripture: Proverbs 29:18, Habakkuk 2:2, 2 Corinthians 4:8-9, Psalm 77 Voices: Esau McCaulley, Howard Thurman, Justo Gonzalez, Dallas Willard, Eugene Peterson

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Version of you that you can't stop thinking about. Not the inflated version, not the fantasy super heroic version. It's something quieter than that. Something that feels like ambition and more like weight. Like something was placed on you before you had the words for it. And as a result, you've been carrying it so long that you've almost stopped telling people about it. Because the gap between where you are right now and where that thing needs you to be has started to just feel outright embarrassing. You've stopped saying it out loud, not because you stopped believing it, no, you still do. But rather it's because you got tired of the look on people's faces when the evidence didn't match the declaration. And I know that look. I have seen it in rooms where I was the one holding the vision, and I've watched it land on people who loved me, and I have watched the pause before they said something kind, and I have known in that pause exactly what they were not saying. Hey everybody, welcome back to Faithformed. I'm your host, Justin Belt, and this is a podcast about honest faith for people who don't have it all together. And what we're really trying to build is a faith that actually holds up. Not a flimsy faith, but a fighting faith. Not a faith for when things are going well, not a faith for the highlight reel, but a faith for the long middle, right? A faith that can carry a vision across years of silence. And that's what we're getting into today. But before we go any further, do me a favor. And if you've enjoyed the purpose arc, if you've enjoyed the calling arc, if you've enjoyed the content that we've been putting out, do me a favor and leave us a five-star rating or review. Wherever you catch this podcast, be it Apple Podcast, Spotify, wherever you're listening, let us know that you are rocking with the work that we're trying to do in encouraging people's faith and providing hope and just encouraging people to trust again through the waiting season, through the hard season. It would mean so much to us. It would be kind of your cosign on the work that we're trying to do as we partner with the Holy Spirit to encourage God's people. Amen. Amen. So I want to start with something that's gonna feel more vulnerable than theological. And I'm gonna ask you to sit with it before we go anywhere else. What is the thing that you cannot stop seeing? Now I'm gonna wait, give you a second to get that into your head. What is that thing that you cannot stop seeing? See, it's it's not the thing that you're supposed to want. It goes deeper than that. It's not the thing that sounds right when you say it in a small group or a prayer circle. It doesn't sound profound where you have to over-enunciate every single syllable of the explanation. What is the thing that keeps returning to you in the shower, in the car, or on the way, on the way to work, or at three o'clock in the morning, man? Like that quiet time when the house is asleep, everybody's asleep. And something in you is very much awake. Because there's a difference between a goal and a vision. A goal is something you set. A vision is something that sets itself on you. A goal, if it doesn't work out, we just pivot, man. We set a new goal. We keep it, we keep it trucking, but a vision, hmm, when it doesn't work out, it doesn't disappear, it doesn't go anywhere. It stays and it waits, and it keeps knocking. The Hebrew word that's used in Proverbs 29, 18 is shazon. Where there is no shazon, the people perish. And most of us grew up getting the the trend the translation of that word as vision. But the actual word carries a prophetic weight to it. It's not just a business plan, it is more of a prophetic revelation. It's what you see when God opens your eyes to what is possible in a particular direction that He's already set for your life. Old Testament scholar Walter Brugeman says that prophetic imagination is not the ability to predict the future, but rather it's the ability to perceive a different present, to see what is not yet visible to the people around you as though it already is. And that's a specific kind of suffering. By the way, it totally is. It's different. To see what is not yet visible, to carry what is not yet landed, to endure the looks of people who have seen you try time and time and time again, to look yourself in the mirror and see the person who keeps having these big ideas, who keeps carrying this big vision, but their life doesn't match up to it. That's different, man. That's a different kind of weight. Esau Macaulay, uh New Testament scholar, we talk about him a lot, but he writes in his book, Reading While Black, about the black church tradition of holding vision across impossibility, of a people who read scripture not as a historical document about someone else's deliverance, but as the living address to their own present captivity. He describes the hermeneutic of hope that is not optimistic, that's not naive, but rooted in a specific conviction about who God is and what God tends to do with people who were in conditions that do not match the promise. I have to ask you, are you in a condition right now that does not match the promise? Right? And I want to borrow his frame because I think it matters here. Because a lot of us are not dealing with a lost vision. You haven't lost it. Rather, what you're dealing with is a vision that arrived before the conditions for it were optimal. And we've spent the intervening years trying to figure out if that means the vision was wrong, or if we were wrong, or if God was wrong, or if God changed his mind, or if we, you know, misheard something that one time in a quiet room, or if during worship, maybe we interpret, we, you know, grabbed a word that God meant for somebody else and we tried to apply it to ourselves and turn it into, you know, a 20-year wait for something that was never ours to begin with. I mean, the the the questions are endless. But the problem is those questions will hollow you out if you're not careful. And I say that as someone who has been hollowed out by those questions, who's had to deal with the what of God. What if God changed his mind about me? What if, what if, you know, God didn't give me that vision? What if I never was supposed to do that thing? I understand the hollowing out that those questions, I understand the pound of flesh, not just the pound of flesh, but the pound of spirit, the pound of hope, the pound of faith that those questions excavate every time they come up. As I was working on this episode, I began to think about nights that I've had that you might be able to relate to. And I can't attach a specific date to them because it wasn't just one night, it was a lot of them. It's still a lot of them. Um these nights that I'm thinking of were in a season that had a particular kind of quality to it. Let me describe it, and I think you'll be able to resonate with it. You're awake when you should not be. The house is quiet, maybe the kids are gone to bed, maybe your spouse has gone to bed. The house is just quiet. Everybody sleep, man. The dogs sleep, the cats sleep, everybody sleep. Even the noisy neighbors, right? Everybody's quiet except you. And you pick up your journal and you open it to an empty page, but you can't find the words to write in it because you've already written in it with a very specific language, right? You you you you try to pray, but the words won't come because you've prayed that prayer over and over again. You've you've laid it before God, you've written it out, and you try not to sound desperate. You try to sound faithful and you try to use just the exact words that you think will please God, but the words won't come, but the thoughts won't stop coming. And your heart won't stop racing because that thing that's inside of you, that vision that's inside of you won't let you sleep, it won't let you rest, it won't let you find peace. But the ceiling is still the ceiling. And you know it because every prayer you pray seems to hit that ceiling and bounce right back down to you. And the silence is still the silence. And the distance between where you're sitting right now and where the vision needs you to be, it hasn't moved yet. I think you know the kind of nights that I'm talking about. And what I found in those seasons was not a revelation, it was not a word from God that broke the silence open and rearranged everything. What I found was something smaller and stranger than that. What I found was that I was still there, that I hadn't left that space, that something in me had decided, without making a dramatic declaration, to stay in the room with that specific thing. And I didn't know yet what to make of that. Like, how do you process that? Like, I'm still here. What I know now is that there is a particular quality of grief that comes with long-carrying a vision. It's not a clean grief. It doesn't organize itself into stages, it has multiple layers running simultaneously, like a laptop that slows down because you have every program on the laptop running, right? It's convoluted. There is a grief of the thing itself, that vision. There is a grief of what you thought it meant about you. There, there is a grief of what people around you are now not saying. And underneath all of that, the question you keep coming back to, the one that you keep asking in that endless, restless dark, is whether the vision was ever real. God, did you really mean it? God, did you really say it? God, did you did you really show me that? Or is my mind playing tricks on me? God, please, like, help me decipher through this. Help me understand. God, am I going crazy? Or was the vision real? Is this weight in my heart? Is this weight in my chest? Is it real, God, or am I going crazy? Who am I speaking to? I know I'm speaking to somebody. And I want to be honest with you. That question, it doesn't have a clean answer. What I can tell you is that I found is what I found on the other side of asking it, though. Paul writes in 2 Corinthians 4, 8 through 9, he says this, we are hard-pressed on every side, but not crushed, perplexed, but not in despair, persecuted, but not abandoned, struck down, but not destroyed. And see, if you were a fan of Israel, you know, you know, he he added that in his songs. We can sing it. But I used to read that verse as a triumphalist, as a statement about Christian resilience that was supposed to make me feel strong. I can puff my chest outright. I'm hard-pressed on every side, on earth's side, but I'm not crushed. Perplexed, but I'm not in despair. But what I read now is something that feels far more honest. The word Paul uses for perplexed is uh a Greek word uh ruminoi, which carries a sense of being without passage, of being in a situation where you cannot see a way through. He's not saying I figured it out. He's saying I could not see a way through. He's saying I could not see a way through, but I also was not destroyed. And that's a totally different testimony than what we normally celebrate, right? Because the vision before the conditions arrives is not comfortable. It's not meant to be. Habakkuk stands in chapter two, and he it he he's already complained to God in chapter one about everything that he sees, about the violence, about the injustice, about the silence. And God says to him, Write the vision, make it plain. It will not lie. Though it tarries, wait for it, because it will surely come. The word tarry in Hebrew is mahar, and it means to linger or delay, which means that God is not telling Habakkuk this is going to be easy. Ooh, come on, somebody. God is not telling him that the conditions that he's in. He's not telling him that they're about to immediately get better. God is saying this thing is real, and it's gonna take longer than you want it to take. And I need you to write it down so that you don't forget what you saw. Write it down because the waiting will try to rewrite it for you, and you cannot let it do that. You need to write it down so you can come back and remember it when the days get hard, when the wait feels long. Come on. Come on. And here's where it gets uncomfortable. And here's where I really need you to stay, stay, stay locked in with me. Most of us don't abandon our visions. We do something more subtle than that. We negotiate them downward until they fit inside of our current conditions. And we don't call it quitting, we call it being, quote unquote, realistic. We call it maturity. We call it not wanting to be one of those people who chases something reckless and bit by bit over the course of years and decades, that chazon that was that that um that was placed in us gets smaller and smaller and smaller until it becomes something that we can manage, something that no longer requires God to do anything we cannot explain. But rather it becomes something that fits inside our current budget, our current relationships, our current audience size, our current level of influence. Come on, Lord, I hear you speaking. I hear you. And we wonder why we feel hollowed out and empty. Howard Thurman writes in Jesus and the Disinherited about the temptation to make peace with the conditions of your captivity, to redefine what is possible in such a way that the current limitations become accessible. He is writing, he's writing in the context of a racial oppression, right? But the spiritual architecture of what he's describing applies everywhere. The temptation to let your conditions become your ceiling is one of the most sophisticated forms of unbelief that exists because it's dressed in the clothing of humility and it sounds like wisdom. It sounds like, oh, this has been going for years. I think maybe God wanted me to do something else. It sounds like I shouldn't have done this, that was disobedience. Because, see, humility that shrinks the God-given vision to fit a current moment is not humility, it is fear wearing a spiritual costume. And I've been there and I'm speaking to you based on what I know. I'm telling you based on lived experience, I'm telling you based on even what I wake up to some days. I think in my brain I'm being humbled by rationalizing away the vision. I think that I'm being humble and doing God a solid by breaking parts off of the vision that he gave me to fit my current situation because maybe God didn't want to move as big as I thought God wanted to move. And maybe I'm not a big enough person for God to move that big vision through me. So let me humble myself and become smaller. And as I become smaller, I make that vision smaller to fit into the smaller space, the confines of my belief with me. Now, I want to be precise here. Because there is a real version of maturity and discernment that does refine a vision over time. Yes, there are visions that need pruning, not abandoning. There are things we carry that are genuinely ours, and things we carry that were never ours to begin with. Family, discernment is real, yes, it is. Refinement is real. But there is a felt difference, even if it's hard to articulate, between a vision that is being refined and a vision that is being extinguished, between pruning and collapse. And most of us know which one is happening if we're honest. The prophetic challenge that I want to lay on the table here is this: stop letting the conditions decide the ceiling. The conditions have never been the final word. The whole sweep of scripture is the story of a God doing things and conditions that physically and spiritually argued against it. A barren woman, a youngest son, a shepherd with a sling, a manger, an empty tomb, conditions have never been the reliable narrator of what God is actually doing. So your conditions should not be the reliable narrator of your life. And if you've been adjusting the vision to fit the evidence, I am not asking you to be reckless. But what I am asking you to do is to notice what you're doing, to name it honestly, because the first step back to the chazon is usually admitting that you left it in the first place. So what do you do then? I hear you asking, Justin Rowe, what do you do with the vision that is not yet arrived? Like, what does faithfulness look like in the in-between? Some of y'all might call it the upside down. I know I have. So I want to offer these three things. And none of them are a program, and they're they're not a five-step framework. I believe these are more, these, these are more closely aligned to postures. And the first one is this you write it down and you keep writing it down. See, Habakkuk 2 and 2 is not a verse about journaling as a productivity hack. It is a command given in the context of a vision that had not yet manifested. And the reason you write it down is not so that you have a plan. The reason you write it down is so that you have a record of what you saw before the waiting rewrote the story. Because the waiting will try to tell you that you imagined it. But the writing is the evidence against that argument. I have pages in journals going back years. Some of what I wrote felt presumptuous when I wrote it. Some of it still feels presumptuous now, but some of it is already landed, though not in the form that I imagined, but in the shape of a thing. And every time I find those old pages, something stirs in me. And it's not because I've arrived, but because the vision was real, and real things have a way of eventually breaking through. The second posture is this stay in the daily formation, even when the daily formation feels disconnected from the vision. And this is the one that nobody wants to talk about, so we're gonna talk about it. Because when you're carrying a vision of something significant, the daily things feel insufficient. When you're called to build something that could reach thousands, spending an hour with five people sounds like a distraction. When you are called to write something that could shift a generation, writing something that nobody reads yet feels like wasted effort. And I'm saying that for me. I'm saying that for me, for author Justin. But it's not wasted effort. Dallas Willard used to say that the most important thing in a person's spiritual formation is not the dramatic moment but the ordinary discipline. That you become what you repeatedly do, not what you intend to do, not what you feel called to do in the future, but what you actually do on a Wednesday afternoon when nothing is working and nobody is watching and nobody is reading and nobody is trying to book you, huh? Eugene Peterson spent most of his pastoral career in a small church in Maryland that grew to about 500 people, which by evangelical success metrics is deeply unimpressive. During those years, he was also working on what would become the message. He spent 30 years doing faithful small work along a significant creative project that the world eventually needed. He wasn't waiting for the conditions to arrive before he became who he was called to be. He was becoming it in the ordinary. The work spoke for it. The work it spoke for itself. And this is what formation is: it's not the grand moment, the ordinary day. That's it. You stay in the daily formation because the vision is not just something you carry into the world. It's something that has to be built into you before it can come out of you. Let me say that again. The vision has to be built into you before it can come out of you. And the building happens in the regular things. The third posture is the hardest. You hold the vision with open hands. And this is hard. This is hard. And I don't mean that you lower your expectations. I don't mean that you settle. But I mean that you submit the specific shape of the vision to the God who gave it to you. Because very often the version of the vision you were holding is the version that God filtered through your ego, your timeline, your preference for how things should look. It got filtered through your things, not God's. Am I right? Am I right? I know I'm right. Justo Gonzalez, who is a Cuban, uh Cuban American historian of Christianity, writes about how the community of faith has always had to distinguish between the call itself and the specific cultural form they imagined the call would take. Because the call was real. The form they insisted it had to take was their own invention. And the insistence on a particular form blocked them from receiving what was actually coming. Open hands does not mean passive faith. I need you to hear me on this. Abraham left Ur for a place he had not yet seen. That's open hands. David was anointed king and then went back to tending sheep. That's open hands. Mary said, Be it unto me according to your word. That's open hands. Not passive, it's not resigned, it's not without desire, but it's submitted. It's held loosely enough that God can redirect and reshape it without having to break something in order to do it. And we struggle with that. We struggle with that. Because when God tells us to write the book, we expect the book to become an Amazon bestseller or a New York Times bestseller. And I was just thinking about this. I was thinking about this before I hit the record button. Right? Justin, would you still write the book if it was only for one person, if only one person wrote it? Or read it? Would you still write the book if nobody left you a favorable review? What if all your reviews were one star and below? Would you still write the book if all the reviews were negative? Would you still write it if only if nobody ever told you that your book was for them? Would you still follow the vision? Huh? Would you still be obedient if nobody patted you on the back? If nobody recognized your ministry, if nobody came to your program, if nobody attended your Zoom Bible study, if nobody patroned your food truck, would you still do it? Because our version of success can often be so closed-handed. God, it has to look like this, it has to take this shape, it has to take this form, and then we end up going through a process where because we're so close-fisted with the calling, with the vision that God gave us, that God has to break foundational things in our lives for us to become moldable, for us to become like clay in his hands, and for him to be able to take that vision and to reshape it and to reform it and to redirect it to the people in the form, in the way that he originally intended for it to come to pass. Am I preaching? I'm sorry. Kind of. And so I can't close out this episode without speaking directly to somebody. Because you're not sure anymore. You had something that you believed was a God-given vision. And enough time has passed and enough things have not worked out that you are genuinely not sure if it were even real. And you feel guilty for not being sure. Hear me. Because you're supposed to be a person of faith. And people of faith are supposed to trust God. And if you trusted God, you would not be sitting here in this particular uncertainty. And I want to say this as carefully and as honestly as I can. And I need you to hear me with an open heart because I'm speaking to you with a heart that has been through that very thing. The uncertainty is not the unfaith. The questioning is not betrayal. Some of the most honest theology in all of scripture is in the Psalms, which are full of people asking God where he went and why he's not doing what he said he was going to do. Psalm 77, Asaph is essentially saying, I am troubled and I cannot speak. I'm holding on to the memory of what you did, and I am putting it up against what I am currently experiencing, and the math is not math in God. Family, that's not a failure of faith. That is a person being honest in the presence of God. And if you have listened to this podcast, you know I am big on being honest when you speak to God. And the question is not about whether you're certain. The question is whether you are still present, whether you are still in the conversation, whether you are still bringing the thing to God instead of trying to carry it all by yourself in the dark. Some visions take longer than a lifetime to land in the form we imagine them. Some of what we carry is meant to be inherited by the next generation, not completed in our own. Some of what we plant is not for us to harvest. And the grace in that, the part that is genuinely good news and not just a soft consolation, is that God is not confused about the timeline. He's not late. The vision before the conditions is not a mistake in the sequencing. Rather, it's the training ground. It is where the formation happens. The things that are forming you in this season are things you cannot form in yourself when the conditions arrive. The patience, the trust, the perseverance, the posture of dependence, the willingness to stay when everything visible argues for leaving. These are things you and I only learn in the in-between. And they are things the vision will need when it finally arrives. So stay. Keep your hands open. Stay in the daily formation. Let the questioning be honest. Let the faith be real enough to include the questions. Because the vision will not lie. Though it tarries, wait for it. Because it will surely come. So here's what I need you to carry with you out of this episode. The vision that was placed on you before the conditions arrived is not a mistake. It's not a misread. But it's a prophetic weight. It is something placed on you and in you by the God who does not confuse the timeline even when you do. Your job right now is not to produce the vision. Your job is to tend to it, to water it, to give it sunshine, to write it down, to stay in the daily formation, no matter how ordinary it feels. To hold that thing, to hold that vision, to hold that prophetic weight with open hands, and to stop letting the conditions decide the ceiling. Because conditions have never been the final word about what God is doing. The conditions are where the formation happens, not where your story ends. And so, God, I want to pray specifically right now. First, for the person who has been carrying this thing for so long that they've almost stopped believing that it was real. For the one who had something fall apart that they thought you were building, they thought you were in it with them, God. They thought that you were going to bring it to a success that they had formed in their heads. For the person who's embarrassed by the gap between what they believe they are called to do and what their life currently looks like. For the man who laid something down in grief and does not know if he's supposed to pick it back up. For the woman who poured herself into something that closed and is sitting in the rubble of that and wondering what it means about you, God. For each person, Lord, meet them there. Not with explanation, not with a tidy answer to the question that they're carrying, just with your presence. God, as you told Jeremiah in Jeremiah chapter 1, I will be with you. God, fill them with the reminder that you were not confused about their story, that you have not lost track of where they're supposed to be heading, that you have not lost track about what you've placed on them. That the vision before the conditions is not a mistake in the sequencing. It is where you do your best work. Lord, give them courage to write it down again. To stay in the ordinary things again. To bring the vision back to you with open hands and to trust that you know what you're doing, even when nothing visible confirms it. God, we are no longer asking for certainty. We are asking simply with open hands for your presence. For your presence to speak to the lies, for your presence, to speak to the confusion, for your presence, to speak to the doubt, to speak to the fear, to the worry, to the anxiety that we've fallen behind. Oh God, speak. As only you can speak. God, we believe that you were here. We believe that you are here. And we thank you. In Jesus' name. Amen. If this episode met you somewhere real, the most important thing you can do right now is to share it. Grab the link, send it to a friend or a family member to listen to it. Share it on your socials so that the people that you love can hopefully get the encouragement that you got through this episode. And it's not because I'm looking for numbers. Honestly, I've been in seasons with podcasts where I've been obsessed with numbers, but 30 downloads, 20 downloads, 15 downloads. I'm good with either. Because I trust that God is getting these episodes to the people who need it. But I'm also asking you to help in that mission to spread the word. Because you know someone who is sitting in the middle of this right now, someone who's tired of carrying something that hasn't landed yet, and they need to hear from someone else that they're not alone in it. So send it to them. Drop it in a text right now. And if you haven't subscribed yet, go ahead and do that so that you don't miss the rest of what's coming with this arc. We are we're just getting started, man. And if Faith Formed has been useful to you, leave a review on Apple Apple Podcast or Spotify. It only takes about a minute. And it genuinely helps people find the show. Alright? Go tend the vision. I'll see you next week. Be blessed.