“Hope deferred makes the heart sick,
But desire fulfilled is a tree of life.”
–Proverbs 13:12

God is a God of dreams. He often speaks into our watery subconscious; planting a future possibility within our heart like a shadowy rock submerged in a deep pool. In our sleep He often writes on our hearts, quiet moments when we are most vulnerable to His voice. These dreams, these thoughts, these stirrings of illumination can awaken faith and stir hope; they are holy epiphanies.

But life is unpredictable like shaving while driving…the unseen bumps in the road slice us open with wincing and unexpected pain. We are often left profusely bleeding, messy and bewildered by the suddenness of it all.

Often our encounters with the razor edge of life, leaves us bleeding deceivingly slow. We lose soul strength, our hearts stop beating hard; we no longer pant after much but settle down into a long yawn.

We can get jaded or just plain bored with youthful idealism and settle for mocking because it’s easier on the heart. Like Fantine in Victor Hugo’s “Les Miserables” we bemoan the death of hope in haunting song:

I had a dream in time gone by
When hope was high
And life worth living
I dreamed that love would never die
I dreamed that God would be forgiving
I had a dream my life would be
So different from this hell I’m living
So different now from what it seemed
Now life has killed my dream.

For many of us, we have forgotten our dreams. We’ve let go of the thoughts of building a unique future and resigned to live out someone else’s vision for our life.

“Without a deep and burning desire of our own,
we will be ruled by the desires of others”.
–John Elderidge

We no longer really pray… not because we have lost faith in prayer, we just no longer have anything that stirs the waters of our soul. Nothing seems to penetrate our petrifying hearts. We have looked into the face of life for too long and like Medusa, she is turning us to stone.

Like Lot’s wife our constant gazing backwards into what we have known immobilizes us from ever looking forward. We are stuck, a pillar of salt, a monument to an obsession with the past. An altar to what was instead of what can be.

Desire gives fervor to prayer. The soul cannot be listless when some great desire fixes and inflames it…Strong desires make strong prayers…The neglect of prayer is the fearful token of dead spiritual desires…There can be no true praying without desire”.
–EM Bounds

“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst –Jesus

We need an encounter with the Lord of Eyes (Rev. 4:6), the God of vision. To be lifted out of the creeping blindness of disillusionment. We need God to again give us mouth to mouth resuscitation to revive our deflated souls (Gen 2:7).

Like Elijah we need to let go of our preconceived ideas of how life should turn out. Let go of our dramatic and flashy preoccupations with thunder, wind and fire and await the Holy Whisperer to come.

Great displays of power can be watched from afar but only those who are intimate and close can hear the whisper.

We have retreated into a cave of disappointment. We hide in our homes, in our TV’s, our computers, our food or whatever else can numb our monotonous suburban souls. We no longer look for mountaintops but have settled for dark holes of safety where we nurse our lonely realities.

We need the voice of God to visit us and call us out of our subterranean wanderings. We need the all-consuming fire to once again ignite our passions; we were not designed to be thermometers but thermostats!

Give me a man in love, he knows what I mean. Give me one who yearns, give me one who is hungry, give me one far away in this desert, who is thirsty and sighs for the spring of the Eternal Country. Give me that sort of man, he knows what I mean. But if I speak to a cold man, he just doesn’t know what I am talking about.” –Augustine

What has sent you to the cave? An illness, a career slump or a brutal divorce? Have you receded into the dark because life has stung you and you can’t get the stinger out? Have you abandoned your passions because it’s uncomfortable to be pregnant with dreams? Do you go through life doped up on spiritual birth control because you can’t handle the stretch marks that vision gives? Are you tired of living in that holy tension of believing before you see?

The whole life of the good Christian is a holy longing, what you desire ardently, as yet you do not see…By withholding of the vision, God extends the longing. Through longing He extends the soul, by extending He makes room in it. Let us long because we are to be filled…that is our life, to be exercised by longing.”
–Augustine

My prayer is that you will be recommissioned like Elijah. Sent out to live a life that is attuned to the whispers of God. To let go of changing the world and instead search out your three (1 Kings 19:15-17). Three men and a whisper is all that God desired of Elijah to focus on and with God that is enough.

God is speaking in the whispers of your desires and no matter how small they may be, in God’s hand they can even turn a nation.

“You open Your hand and satisfy the desire of every living thing.”
–Ps. 145:16

“Delight yourself in the Lord and He will give you the desires of your heart”
–Psalms 37:4