Don't be surprised if your dream dies.

Leaders must be dreamers.  To be an effective leader one must always be dreaming of a preferred future for his or her organization.  What might your church be like five years from today?  Where do you see your business going in the next five years?  How do you see your role changing over the course of the next five years?  What about ten years?  To simply sit and address the day-to-day affairs of an organization isn't leading.  That's management.  Both are important to the success of every organization, but the leader must be constantly be looking into the future and dreaming about the possibilities that exist.

Of course, most leaders can tell stories of when their dreams died.  They thought they had everything planned out, and suddenly everything changed, and their dreams were no longer viable.   Some never overcome their disappointment.  They stop dreaming, and they stop leading.  They assume that because their dream didn't come to pass in the time they planned and in the way they planned that it was not going to happen.

God had promised Abram that he would be the father of many nations, and yet his wife Sarah did not conceive.  God renewed his promise several times, and each time it appeared less and less likely that it could come to pass.  Both Abram and Sarah were well advanced in years and passed child-bearing age.  Yet, when Abram was 100 years old Sarah gave birth to their son, Isaac.  Why did it take so long for Abram's dream to come to pass, especially when it was one given to him by God?  I agree with those scholars who believe it was so God would get all the glory when it came to pass.  Both Abram and Sarah were well past the ages where anyone would expect her to conceive, so when Isaac was born there was no doubt that it was a miracle brought about by God.

In recent weeks I've read several accounts of ministry leaders who had a dream to plant a new church in a certain location.  Despite their best efforts, those church plants never worked out.  Their dreams seemed to have died until they later felt led to start a new church or ministry in another location.  Those new churches flourished.  Did these leaders misunderstand the location of the new church in their original dream?  Did they miss God's timing?  I can't answer either of those questions, but even though their original dream died they never stopped dreaming, and eventually they saw their dreams come to pass.

Mark Batterson wrote a great book called In a Pit With a Lion On a Snowy Day: How to Survive and Thrive When Opportunity Roars.  He had written several manuscripts before this book was accepted for publication, but none had been accepted.  He felt called to write as part of his ministry, but his dream of being a writer was dying with every rejection.  Imagine his joy when this book was accepted!  Imagine how he felt later when the editors made him completely rewrite the book a second time before it was published.  Even that book went through a death and resurrection.  As a writer myself I understand how precious that book was to Batterson and how painful it must have been to have been told it had to be rewritten.

Nearly every leader has had dreams that seemed to die and then were later resurrected so don't be surprised when it happens to you.  Continue to dream big dreams that will require God to achieve.  Share those dreams with others and ask them to pray with you.  Expect the dreams that seemed to have died to be resurrected later, but don't be surprised if they look a little different than you thought they would.