Do You Have a Secret Dream God is Calling You to Pursue?

Posted on Aug 13, 2019 Topic : Inspirational/Devotional, Women's Christian Living
Posted by : Yvrose Telfort Ismael

When Yvrose fled her native Haiti for the United States, she couldn’t imagine she’d return. Then she met Jesus—uttering her first “yes” to God. That one yes became many when she couldn’t forget the faces of the children she saw in a recurring dream. On a trip back to Haiti her dream came to life...

The tears started flowing as soon as I saw it. It wasn’t strong enough to be called a building, and it seemed that even the lightest gust of wind or shallowest of floods would tear it down. With its blue tarp sheets stretched tightly over a frame of twisted, rotten sticks, it looked more like a makeshift den than a place where young lives would be prepared for the future. But there it was, the only school in the village.

It wasn’t the fragility of the building that made me cry. It was its familiarity.

I’d seen this place in my dream. The only difference was that as I stood beside the voodoo priest, my brother, and the old lady and looked at the school, I knew I was looking at the answer to the question echoing within me for months.

I’d wanted to know why. Why was God giving me these dreams? Why was he showing me these people and this place and stirring me up like this? And—for the past hour, ever since my brother Telfort and I had turned the corner outside Fond Parisien—why was God leading me to this place, on this day?

And here was my answer.

I was here to help the school.

I hadn’t heard an audible voice or seen bright lights shining down. But I knew that this was what God wanted. I knew it the way you know that when you take your next breath in, your lungs will fill with the oxygen you need to survive. I knew it the way you know gravity will hold the cup that you place on a table. This knowledge went so deep that it instantly and completely answered my question.

So even before I took one step toward the school or spoke to the woman who was crouched in the dirt, boiling water on a charcoal fire, I knew that I was all in. I knew I was prepared to do anything I could to help.

“Teacher. This lady has come to help,” the voodoo priest said. With that, he and the old woman turned away and left Telfort and me alone with Cecile.

My own classroom in Charlotte could not have been more different. Back in the U.S. I had desks and chairs, computers, and a video screen. I could use anything I wanted to teach my French classes—film, music, text books—and when the bell rang and I went home for the day, someone would clean my room.

In front of me was nothing much more than a mud floor and fragile walls. There were just two wooden benches, both broken and unable to stand properly, and an old chalkboard that was too wrecked and broken to write on more than one-third of it. I could not see any books or pens, no posters or resources of any kind.

When Cecile told me she hadn’t been paid in four months, but stayed to help the children learn, I wanted to hug her and burst into tears at the same time. We were both teachers, but I got frustrated when my classroom didn’t get cleaned. Would I still turn up for work if I missed four paychecks in a row?

I didn’t have to think hard about what I did next. I didn’t have to talk it through or give time for the plan to develop. I didn’t have to go away and pray about it. I knew that God had brought me there to meet with Cecile and that He had laid out in front of me the clearest invitation I had ever been given—to help.

From my bag I pulled enough money to cover Cecile’s missing wages—which was less than the price of a pair of heels.

“I want you to have this,” I said. “But I also want you to know that I’m coming back. God has been leading me on a journey and I know that this is where I’m supposed to be helping. So, if you’ll have me, I’d like to do what I can to support you. Is that okay?”

Cecile nodded. We hugged. And Telfort’s laughter filled the whole village.

For so many years I had felt lost. For years I’d not known where—or who—I was supposed to be. I’d failed as a mother, failed as a wife, and I’d been convinced that even as a Christian I was weighed down by the shame of my past sins. Finally, I felt like I knew where and who I was supposed to be.

I had been looking in all the wrong places—in sex, in status, in relationships. I had been searching in the land of wealth and privilege, when all along I was supposed to be here, to be helping, to be trusting God for whatever He had in mind for me to do next. It was as simple as saying “yes” to Him.