Vision

Recently through a conversation, the subject came up about how to live day by day but still do it with a vision of where you are going.  The answer might lie in what season of life you are in or in consideration of the biggest challenge you are facing right now in your life.  I know the older I get, the less forward thinking I have become and the more I focus on the day-to-day relationships and tasks that are put in front of me.  Having said that, I will say that vision is the most wonderful driving force in my life even today.  
The depth of vision in the Bible is in hope.  Job, through circumstances in his life, struggled with hope just like you and I do today.  The Psalmist writes in Psalms 42 that his soul was disturbed and troubled and his only hope was in God.  In Lamentations, the writer says that he has to do a mind recall to have hope in his soul, meaning that there was a past experience in his life where he saw God in some way in his life that helped him have hope.  The writer of the book of Romans says hope did not disappoint him because of God’s love for him.  
Horatio Spafford, through great tragedy, never lost hope in God.  He and his wife Anna lost a child to scarlet fever, lost all their belongings in the fires of 1871 in Chicago, and a few years later, lost four more children in a shipwreck.  As he was traveling over the Atlantic at the spot where his children drowned, he penned the words to the song It Is Well With My Soul:  “When peace like a river, attendeth my way; when sorrows like sea billows roll; whatever my lot, thou hast taught me to say, it is well, it is well, with my soul.”  Horatio knew that the only way to live with vision and to face the day to day was hope in Jesus Christ.  With this kind of hope, vision becomes the reality of who you are, not what you do.  
When we are on a path of discovery of who we are in our relationship with Jesus Christ, our hope is not in what we do but who we are becoming.  In the process of this development, even scriptures begin to make more sense like the verses in Romans Chapter 8 that says: “And we know that God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose.”  We discover God’s purpose through the struggles in our life day to day with hope for the future.  Scripture even tells us what to do in the struggles:  “In the same way the Spirit also helps our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we should, but the Spirit Himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words; and Jesus who searches the hearts knows what the mind of the Spirit is, because Jesus intercedes for the saints according to the will of God.”  Jesus, with the love of God, loves us and will provide hope through that love.  “Who will separate us from the love of Christ?  Will tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?”  This love has the strength to provide hope even in the challenges of this life.  “But in all these things we overwhelmingly conquer through Him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other created thing, will be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
If you are struggling in your day-to-day life, connect with a church that will share the Word of God with you.