Sometimes, the problem with a vision is that it’s foggy. We want to describe a place, when all we know is what the weather is like there.
God painted a vision of the land of Israel for Moses: “a good and spacious land, a land flowing with milk and honey—the home of the Canaanites, Hittites, Amorites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites” (Exodus 3:8). The description wasn’t exact—it didn’t have GPS coordinates, or boundaries on a topographical map. It was simply vivid with both the promise and the dangers.
The fact that any given community doesn’t know how to get to a vision isn’t really a challenge. They expect you to tell them how to get there.
The real challenge of a vision is: you probably don’t know how to get there either. And equally probably, the community knows it.
The community has to trust that, together, their merry little band will somehow, in some way, figure out how to make the journey.
In order to do that, they have to believe in the vision and the value of it, and in themselves and in those who will one day join them (and, to some degree, in you and your ability to successfully experiment and learn from failure).
It will also take transparency. The leaders—you and others—will have to honestly say you don’t have all the answers (because you won’t), while insisting bravely that you can seek the answers out together.
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