Nothing but...

I have recently been in a time of visioning. Where am I going to be in the next year? How about the next five or ten years? When you start praying into your future and God starts revealing to you visions, it can some times be overwhelming. The thing is though, God gives us these visions to offer us hope, not so we feel inadequate. We can start filtering these visions and dreams through our minds and not our spirits, clogging the truth and making our goals seem unattainable. 

This was the mind set of a widow who met Elisha in 2 Kings 4. Her husband, the care taker  of the family recently died and left behind some debt. Creditors had come to her, threatening to take her two sons to sell as slaves because she had no real means to pay them. Elisha simply asks her, "What do you have?"

Ask your self that. Do you have a job with a good income? Do you have administrative or leadership skills? Do you have a heart to serve and be hospitable? What talents or gifts do you have? Search your life and pick out something that is working in your life. This is always a great place to start when trying to figure out how take the next step into this elaborate vision and dream God has placed into your spirit. Every one of us is blessed with something, yet most of the time we just simply will answer "Nothing". 

The widows first reply to Elisha was just that. "Nothing at all... well, except for this flask of olive oil." She almost doesn't even mention this flask because to her it is so miniscule. We are lead to believe that this olive oil was her very last possession. If I were asked what I had lying around my house, a jar of olive oil would be far down on the list. It is here that God shows us that even with the smallest things in life can be used to change someone's world.

Elisha now tells the widow to go to all her friends and neighbors and ask them for empty vessels. This is huge! People around us can be resources to get to our God given dreams. When I moved to NYC, I ended up selling a large amount of my things to help pay for the transition. This included my guitars. For those who do not know me or what I do, music has always been my olive oil. So when we arrived here, I was with out a vessel, a conduit, to use my olive oil. Thankfully the pastors happened to have a guitar that was open for me to use. What is better, this guitar was even better than the ones that I had to leave behind. 

There are ample opportunities and vessels that are already around us that we can sometimes overlook and pass by. Use your spirit to filter your vision so that you see the realities of heaven. See the open doors. See the empty vessel that can be used to produce great things in your hands. In the hands of Samson, a donkey's jawbone was the perfect weapon to defeat the enemy. 300 men in the right hands of Gideon was all God needed to win a battle. We all have something to work with. Find it. Embrace it. Use it.