A Vision from God

It isn't a strange thing to hear about someone having a vision from God when you are overseas. In fact, being in Lebanon the past couple of summers, I have actually met a lot of people who have had some sort of vision. Most of the time, the person that I met had once been an unbeliever, or even opposed to God, and then they saw Jesus Christ in a dream and it forever changed their life. But on other occassions, and this is much more frequent, God speaks to someone through a dream, giving them a solution to a problem or giving them a vision for what He is going to do.

Many of you know that I am a computer science major and that this is my final year of school. In order to graduate, we have to do a senior project, displaying all of the knowledge that we have learned over our years at Marshall. The way that we do this is by partnering with an individual or a company and creating some sort of software for them to meet the needs of something that they are currently unable to do. Many people in my class partnered with local businesses or professors, but I got the great pleasure of partnering with Rick and Anita Gutierrez, the two missionaries that I met this summer in South Africa.

Patrick, my partner, and I have been hard at work this semester, developing software that analyzes the data that they currently collect when test the thickness of the carotid artery. (More information can be found on this by visiting my website at users.marshall.edu/~mcclure53).

Rick was at my house this past weekend, as he has come in for a couple of months to work on support raising. His wife and two boys will join him in a few weeks. Our goal was to have Release 1 done for Rick in time for this weekend so that he could test it on some patients in Michigan before heading back to South Africa. Release 1 simply just contains a way of calculating and analyzing the data and Release 2 will consist of a database and any other features that Rick decides will enhance his ministry.

Well of course whenever you start inputting real data, that is when all of the bugs come out. When the program crashes or when it calculates something wrong, that is usually an indication that there is an error in your code. With my hopes being able to give Rick the program on Friday night slowly growing dim, I knew that I had to start planning for many hours of work on it that weekend.

In total, probably an additional 10-15 hours were spent, fixing errors and making corrections to the design of the software to better fit Rick's liking. But there was one error that I came to that I just could not fix. I looked through the code over and over again (which takes a while when you have 10,000 lines of code), but I just could not seem to come up with the solution. That is when, on Saturday night, I told Rick that I would just have to concede and talk to Patrick or my professor the following week and just mail him a copy.

Saturday night I went to bed, and that is when I found out God knew Java programming language. I laid there in my bed having a dream where I was programming the software that I had been working on all semester. Please know that I do not dream about programming that often. In fact, I never had. But as I got to the point in my dream where the program usually crashed, that is when a solution was revealed to me. When I awoke, I immediately wrote down what I had seen, so as not to forget it while waking up. And then I went ahead and got ready for Sunday morning church.

Before church, I talked to my dad and shared with him what had happened that night. The more that I thought about what I had seen, the more I thought about how much sense it made. I had yet to implement the line of code into my program, but the more I thought, the more I was certain that it was going to work.

During the afternoon, I finally got around to sitting down at my laptop and inserting the line of code, exactly as I had seen it in my dream, and then I clicked the Start button. Up popped the program and everything was running perfectly! It was absolutely incredible!

A couple of hours later, Rick showed up and I was able to tell him about what happened and give him a working program. He joined me in praising God for what He had done during the night. No longer will Rick have to wait on the software, but now he can take it to Michigan and test it on patients to ensure that it works.

I so often think about Psalm 67, where it says that God blesses us so that we can bless the nations, who in turn worship God. Then when they worship God, God blesses them and they use those blessings to bless the nations. So the cycle continues. But that revelation that came to me that night was a way of God blessing me with the answer so that I could bless the nations. This software is more than just a tool to calculate and analyze data, it is a tool that will speed up the process of their calculations so that Rick and Anita can spend less time doing math and more time doing ministry.

If the cycle continues as it does in Psalm 67, and as I am confident that it will, this product that God has blessed us with will be a great tool in helping Rick and Anita reach the people of South Africa for Christ. It is such an incredible thing to be a part of His plan in this way.

My challenge to you, now, is to consider the ways that God has blessed you. What skills, knowledge, resources, or even dreams, has God given you that you can use to bless the nations. It is such a joy to be a part of what God is doing in the world, and in reality, that is the only thing that matters. How cool is it to think that what I am currently doing, or what you are currently doing, can help advance the kingdom of God around the world?

God speaks to us, and He blesses us, so that in turn we can share His name and spread His glory around the world.