Pastors

What Is Vision, Anyway?

It’s not always easy to describe.

Vision is essential to ministry, but it’s intangible. How can we understand it? How can we describe it to others?

To help, LEADERSHIP collected quotations that try to describe this mysterious thing we call vision.

Vision is the art of seeing things invisible.

– Jonathan Swift

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A vision is the dominant factor that governs your life.

It determines all the choices you are making.

It’s what’s left after all the layers are peeled away like an onion.

Clinging like glue to the inside of your rib cage …

It’s what your mind naturally gravitates toward when it is not legitimately

concentrating on something else.

It’s … what determines your friendships and your relationships that you are

cultivating. …

It’s what your prayers are about–what you dream about and are giving money

toward.

– Phil Grant

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Vision is merely hope with a blueprint.

– Anonymous

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Your purpose … has nothing to do with grandiose goals, lofty achievements, or universal fame. It is the quiet confidence that, even if you never leave your neighborhood, you will have lived fully.

– Sybil Stanton

WHY WE NEED VISION

Where there is no vision, the people perish.

– Proverbs 29:18

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It would be easier to develop great statesmen if vision were as available as television.

– Indianapolis Times

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A moment’s insight is sometimes worth a life’s experience.

– Oliver Wendell Holmes

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Vision is the world’s most desperate need. There are no hopeless situations, only people who think hopelessly.

– Winifred Newman

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If you treat an individual as he is, he will stay that way, but if you treat him as if he were what he could be, he will become what he could be.

– Goethe

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Two men look out through the same bars: One sees the mud, and one the stars.

– Frederick Langbridge

FINDING COURAGE FOR VISION

The only person who likes change is a wet baby.

– Mark Twain

********************

Do not let what you cannot do interfere with what you can do.

– John Wooden

********************

Unless you try to do something beyond what you have already mastered, you will never grow.

– Ralph Waldo Emerson

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The bravest are surely those who have the dearest vision of what is before them, glory and danger alike, and yet notwithstanding go out to meet it.

– Thucydides

Copyright (c) 1994 Christianity Today, Inc./LEADERSHIP Journal

Copyright © 1994 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.

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The Leadership Journal archives contain over 35 years of issues. These archives contain a trove of pastoral wisdom, leadership skills, and encouragement for your calling.

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