5: Being a Visionary for Your Own Life
Let’s take a moment to let love take over! Really imagine what your life will be like when you let love take over.
That feels so good.
Okay. I got a message for you. I stopped by today to tell you that you are a visionary.
Yes, YOU. You right there. You — who think I’m not talking to you. You. Yes, you are a visionary!
Let me share with you my thesis. In order for the vision to manifest, you must put yourself in the picture. Too often the vision is delayed because we get a picture, but we’re not in it. And if you don’t see you in the picture, then something’s not quite right!
I went today to the prophetic book of Amos, Chapter 3, verse 7.
Surely the Lord God does nothing unless he reveals his secret to his servant, the Prophet. In other words, there is not one thing that I am going to do — through you — that I am is not going to reveal in advance to you. That’s such a powerful revelation right there. I have three things that I want to give you today.
The first, is that a visionary is one who thinks about future plans with imagination or wisdom. The second, is that revelation precedes manifestation. And the final point I want to give you, is that you’ve got to put yourself in the picture! …So, let’s get to it!
Be a Visionary
A visionary is one who thinks about or plans the future with imagination or wisdom. This is a person with original ideas about what the future will or could be like.
See, everyone has the capacity to be a visionary, but some of us don’t consider ourselves visionaries. Somewhere along the way, someone either told you explicitly, or they implied it, or they shared it implicitly that you were not a visionary. And so, I just stopped by today to dispel that myth! You are a visionary. In fact, let’s declare that.
I want you to stand up. Stand up. Come on, get up. Get up. Because see, we’re waking up energy, right? We’re waking up something inside of us. And I want you to declare with me…
I am a visionary!
Say it like I can hear it. “I am a visionary!” And one more time for the subconscious mind, “I am a visionary!”
See, you must name the truth about you for it to become the truth about you. To often we undervalue ourselves. We think that somehow, we are insignificant. But I want you to know that whatever God is going to do through you, God is first going to reveal it to you in your imagination. Whatever the spirit is going to do through you, the spirit is going to reveal to you in your imagination.
And this may be in pictures, it might be in words. This is what the author says. He says, “God communicates in us, with us in various ways. Sometimes it’s in words, and other times it may be through pictures. The tool of visualizing is to help you rev up that spiritual engine called the imagination for the future that is to come.”
Revelation Precedes Manifestation
Point number two: revelation precedes manifestation. God always reveals the plan before the plan comes to life. Did you hear that? God always reveals the plan before the plan comes to life. Surely, the Lord God does nothing unless he reveals his secret to his servant, the prophets.
And so, I want to tell you that only he who does not listen is surprised by life. Everything that has happened in your life, God revealed it to you before it came to pass. Have you ever found yourself saying, “I knew that was going to happen!” or “I had a feeling that that was going to happen.” Whatever is coming to pass, and you’re receiving it at the level that you can receive it.
But spiritual mastery essentially comes down to this: It is about listening and learning to listen more deeply to the messages of God that are all around us.
To use an analogy: we are the fish, and the message from God is the water. And so, God’s messages are all around us. We’re swimming in it. We are dripping in it! And what the tool of visualization (and visioning) does for us, is that it helps to sensitize us to the message. The message is everywhere, evenly present. This message is being broadcast even in this moment as we are speaking. We must have the ear, the sensitivity of spirit, in order to receive it. And so, this visualization is a creative process that allows us to perceive what is already out there. It allows us to tune into God’s station.
This process — and I want to be clear — this process is co-creative. I don’t want to suggest that you are being acted on by a force outside of you. This is very important to remember. You are instead directing a power within you.
And so, going back to the fish analogy, the places in life for you to explore are vast and open, just like the ocean. And you are not carried by the currents of life. You are the conductor of the currents. Through your thinking, you are guiding the process.
I want to tell you the story of this woman. Some of you may have heard about her before, but her story really touched me so deeply because she was a living example of what it meant to listen to God. Her name was Eula McClaney, and Eula grew up dirt poor. She got all the way to the 6th grade, and that was as much as education as she was able to get.
But she wanted to have a better life for herself. And she was someone who had a close relationship with God… this was always something that was important to her.
Eula grew up down South, and then moved up North and got married. She scraped together pennies, nickels, and dimes, enough to put a down-payment on a row home in Pittsburgh, PA. And with the extra rooms in the house, she decided to rent those out. And those extra rooms brought in extra income. And eventually she was able to turn this extra income into another home.
And Eula, she’s doing all of this with absolutely no cooperation from her would-become ex-husband. Every house that she would buy and then rent out, she would then reinvest the profits and buy another house. This woman — with a 6th grade education and a husband fighting her all along the way, refusing to do any of the repair work — must go and spend extra dollars to get the repairs done. And eventually she amasses a real estate fortune.
This woman with a 6th grade education, buys a mansion in the nice section of Pittsburgh, PA, and her husband refuses to move to the mansion! In fact, with one of the rental properties, I think a couple of her tenants ended up suing her, and her husband went to court and testified on behalf of the tenants that were suing her.
Now one summer, Eula came out to Los Angeles, CA, for the first time for a vacation, probably one of the first vacations that she had had in her life. And she fell in love with this beautiful Southern California weather! (And those of you that have lived here for any length of time, you know what I mean! It’s always pretty. We don’t really have too many clouds in the sky. It’s just beautiful.)
Long story short, Eula fell in love with this LA weather and decided to stay. She tried to get her husband to move out, and he refused. Eventually they divorced, and get this, he got the mansion and then he moved in with his new girlfriend… but that’s a whole other story!
So, Eula picks up the pieces, and she has just enough money to buy a motel in the West LA section of town. She turns it into assisted living to help men that are getting a second chance at life to get back on their feet. And this project did so well for her, that it helped her rebound her real estate business after a painful divorce. The last property that she bought is in an area of Los Angeles called Holmby Hills, and her daughter still lives there today.
And the reason this story stood out to me so much was because I was just so impressed by this amazing woman’s story. She wrote an autobiography that’s out of print now (but you can go to used bookstores and find it), called God, I Listened. And I thought that it was just such an incredible testimony of what it means to listen to God, because here is this woman, dirt poor, coming from the south in the 20s, and started scraping together pennies to eventually build a real estate fortune, that at the time of her death was valued at hundreds of thousands of dollars! This is all to show you what’s available to you (and how amazing it is!) when you open up and listen!
Put Yourself in the Picture
Which brings me to my final point: you’ve got to put yourself in the picture. Too often we don’t put ourselves in the picture. Einstein said, “Your imagination is the preview of life’s coming attractions.”
But what I have found, is that many of us are afraid to imagine life being wonderful. We are absolute masters at running through worst case scenarios. And so, I want to encourage you to put your vision down on paper. Write down where you expect to go. Write down where you would like to go.
Habakkuk, chapter two, verses two and three, says, “Then the Lord replied, “Write down the revelation and make it plain on tablet so that a herald may run with it, for the revelation awaits an appointed time. It speaks of the end and will not prove false, though it lingers. Wait for it. It will certainly come and will not delay.””
Often what delays the manifestation, is that we created a picture but didn’t put ourselves in it. See yourself in it. See yourself doing it now! This is where the mindfulness, the meditation and the breathing come in, because all of us get slammed by life. All of us do. There is not one of us that is exempt from life lifting on us. I took that from Glenda. I thought that was so clever. Life is just life, and all over the place there is not one of us that does not experience something that honestly knocks us on our butt. And if you haven’t had something like that, just keep living!
And so, I want to encourage you to know that you can come back from anything. You are God’s miracle, not God’s mistake. Everything that you have been through is evidence of what is right with you. I don’t know if you thought about it like that.
Everything that you have been through is evidence of what’s right about you.
Some of you have survived the worst of life and bounced back. And this is the best part! You have a 100% success rate of surviving your worst days. Apparently, you have enough vision to get through whatever you’ve been through, whatever it was going on. Friends who let you down, folks betraying you, let down some loved ones. Backstabbing coworkers, treacherous financial times, low self-esteem, neglectful parents. You got a 100% survival rate! A 100% success rate of surviving everything that you’ve been through, everything that came up against you.
You had enough vision to get through it, get over it, get around it. Everything that tried to stop you, you had the ability to best it.
And guess what… You have even more in you! See, we have this song that says, “I can have as far as I can see.” But the reality is that you’re having as far as you have seen.
And so, if you’re going to have more, you’re going to have to see more. Your life is evidence of the furthest that you’ve seen. But this is the good news: You are going to have to wake up, you can wake up that inner-visionary, and you can begin to speak the word. You can begin to put yourself in the picture.
It’s time to wake up that sleeping giant! Time to empower the giant within. You are going to have to wake up that visionary inside you that has been lying dormant. And so, I want you to declare with me: I am a visionary.
“I am a visionary. I have the vision to see the things that God wants to do through me. I am a spiritual master.”
Oh, say it like you mean it! “I am a spiritual master. I am a deep listener. I listen deeply to the voice of God inside of me. Grand visions now flow into my mind, setting my heart of fire for the things of the spirit. I am a visionary. This is my time. This is my season.”
You’ve got to decide that you’re coming for everything that’s yours this year. You’ve got to decide that there are opportunities all around you. Everywhere you look is an opportunity. You are the fish and opportunity is everywhere I turn.
“I am a visionary. I can now see the things of God.”
So What Now?
In order for your vision to manifest, you must put yourself in the picture. For Eula to amass the fortune that she did before she transitioned, she had to see herself in the picture. And I want you to get that. Only you need to see you in the picture. She had a whole husband working against her as she tried, as she worked to build, as she labored to build this amazing real estate fortune, a whole husband living in her house who she felt obligated to. And even despite the way that he showed up, she continued to labor for the vision. For her vision.
You only work for what you can see yourself doing. I don’t know if you’ve ever thought about that. You don’t reach for what you think you can’t do. No one reaches for what they think they can’t do. So, part of what keeps the good from coming, is that you don’t see you doing it.
And I’m saying, put yourself in the picture! See yourself doing it. Imagine yourself being the one interviewed on the podcast. Imagine it’s you being written up in the magazines.
I was listening to a podcast with this woman who’s a brand manager and helps people develop their brands. And this podcaster at the end of every podcast will ask, “Where do you see yourself in the next five years? I always want to ask people to say where they want to be… and then five years from now, we’ll have this record.” And I love what this young lady said. She said, “I want to be on first name basis with Beyonce. I think Beyonce is awesome, but I see some opportunities with what she’s not doing with her brand. And I believe I can take her to the next level.”
Now, come on! That’s how you see yourself in the picture! You name where it is that you’re going to go. “I am a visionary. Opportunities are all around me.”
And so, I want you to remember that a visionary is one who thinks about or plans the future with imagination and wisdom, and that revelation precedes manifestation. You must get it in your mind before you have it out in the world. You must grasp it internally for you to have it externally.
And finally, you must put yourself in the picture!! You can construct any picture that you like. The canvas for your life is blank. No matter what picture has been painted before, the canvas before you is blank. And while you are running scenarios in your mind, imagining the wonderful things that can happen, never forget to see you doing it!
God bless you.
