In today’s world, sometimes it’s hard to have “vision” beyond what we will have for dinner in a few hours, much less a year or two down the road. With things changing and shifting so often, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to set goals, make plans, and run after them relentlessly. In America it’s easy to grab ahold of the “just take care of you” or “this makes the most sense to me” narrative and have no grid for the kind of world we’re creating for our children and our children’s children.
I’ve heard stories of old men in ancient days that would plant hundreds of acres of seeds, with the vision that one day their great grandchildren would have an entire forest of old oak trees to build with and cultivate. They saw beyond themselves and paid a price for something that they would never reap the benefit of themselves. We see the same story with biblical kings that would invest everything they had to build a temple that they would never actually lay their own eyes on, because it would take hundreds of years to complete. What’s the difference between them and us? What has changed?
It all comes down to vision. These people chose to say no to what made sense in a moment because they saw the inheritance that they could leave for their children’s children, and it was worth it to them.
We talk a lot about our “500-year vision” around here. It seems startling to people sometimes. How can you have vision for something that you may never see come to pass? Our answer looks a lot like the old man with the handful of seeds. We’re thinking about the ripple effect that just one life can make. What’s our vision? An Orphan-less World. We don’t think we’re going to get there overnight. Maybe not even in our lifetime, although we will believe for it and do everything we can to see it come to pass. But every single thing we do, every life saved, every family transformed, every orphan adopted, is one seed in the ground.
When we go after the root system of the problem rather than adding a quick bandaid, it may not look as appealing, many days it may feel as though you are never even making a dent. But day after day, week after week, month after month, and year after year something deeper is happening. Real transformation is taking place. Walking with people through their pain, through their questioning, through their real life, ultimately gives way for healing. When lives are healed from the deepest root system, the generational line changes. The cycles begin the break, and we begin to watch as the new lives being born never have to experience or face what their grandparents and parents did. So though it may not be tomorrow that everything changes, we know that over time, even in 500-years, things will look different because someone fought for wholeness even when wholeness looked so far away.