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The hotels are fully booked – 3

The Bible tells the story of a man who, being a Levite, was supposed to be a priest of God. He left the company of fellow Levites in his town to look for wherever he could find a means of survival. At that time, Levites were totally consecrated to the service God as a full-time preoccupation. And God pledged Himself to them and their upkeep. All material gifts to God in the temple were theirs to use. But the man in the story left that company to go and look for a means of survival elsewhere.

In his wanderings, he ended up in the house of a man who was a collector of idols and he was appointed a priest to the entire pantheon. He later graduated from family idolatry to tribal idolatry.

If you do not know where you are going, nobody can give you directions. If you don’t decide your destination in life, somebody else will make that decision for you. If you make your life an open cheque, someone will help you to write a figure on it. Why? Nature abhors a vacuum!

Timing is an essential ingredient in the success cocktail. Every vision is peculiar and has its season of fulfilment. The fact that you have a vision today does not mean it will come to pass the same day or the next. Like a pregnancy, every vision has a gestation period and a time of manifestation. A pregnancy that is born before its due time is called premature. The resultant baby would need intensive care in an incubator to survive. Even then, it is highly susceptible to infections.

A vision is to give you a foretaste of what is ahead, but there must be a journey towards the vision. A great vision is motion-activated. Some of us want the destination but we don’t want the journey. We desperately want the baby but not the pregnancy. That being the case, the best you can do is to adopt another person’s child. This is what many are doing today. They are running their lives on other people’s agenda.

The surest way to kill a man is to take the vision of God from him and give him a counterfeit or a substitute. Since that is not why he was created and gifted to do, he will labour extra hard, and nothing will happen until he dies in and of frustration. Even if you have detours on the way, never forget or forsake the destination.

Endure the gestation period. The process is as important as the destination. Israel was to spend 400 years in Egypt. When they had been there for 390 years, Moses wanted to jumpstart the process. God delayed it for another 40 years.

The time of waiting is the time of preparation. You must build capacity to nurture the pregnancy to maturity. Otherwise, the baby will be malformed, and instead of delivering a child, you will succeed in delivering a monster that you yourself cannot even nurse, or at best a Mongol.

To every vision, there is an appointed time. There is a reason for your season, and there is a season for your reason. Even while experiencing great discomfort, every pregnant woman is motivated by the prospect of the joy of holding her baby in her hands. So when she goes through pain, she cries, even throws tantrums, but she doesn’t ask God never to give her another pregnancy.

On the day of delivery, she experiences birth pangs. But she doesn’t give up. She must push the baby out. She must mount pressure so that she can attain pleasure. If an expectant mother does not apply pressure, her child may not be born without interventionist surgery. When you get to a point in your life when certain things seem to be unsettling you, especially around your vision, it may be the beginning of birth pangs.

Tope Popoola