A few weeks ago, I stood in front of our church leaders to paint a picture of the next seven years of our church life.

I enjoy looking into the future to see where I and those I lead will be in the years ahead. You’ve likely read many definitions for the word vision. It’s a common practice nowadays for businesses to do what our church did last month — vision casting.

Some definitions of vision that I’ve come across are:

• seeing the invisible and making it visible;

• foresight with insight, based on hindsight;

• an informed bridge from the present to the future;

• and a clear mental picture of a preferable future.

But the definition I use most often is simply the ability to see the future as an attainable reality.

I keep a small ornament on my library shelf which reminds me on a regular basis of the danger of not having vision.

It is a peach stone. It’s been sitting in my office for about seven years.

Consider what would have been the present reality if I had planted that peach stone in the fertile soil of my backyard seven years ago. I’d have a healthy peach tree which would be producing a crop of peaches every summer.

But there it sits, full of unrealized potential, maybe for the next twenty years.

I read recently of a dig in Japan where a canoe, estimated to be two thousand years old, was found buried in a peat bog. When the archeologists cleaned out the canoe that had been buried about ninety feet underground for two millennia, they were amazed to find inside its bow a small living lotus seed.

Realizing that the lotus seed had been preserved since the time of Jesus, they very carefully replanted it in soil and gave it the heat, light and water that it required.

Wonderfully, in due time the seed produced a stalk, leaves and a gorgeous lotus flower. It simply had to be planted so that the new life could break out of its shell.

Many years ago I learned a lesson which I have never forgotten — how to train fleas. You can actually train tiny fleas to do what you want.

To begin, you simply have to catch a few fleas (that’s the hardest part) and place them in a small jar. Because fleas have the natural talent of jumping hundreds of times their own height, you must also place a lid on the jar so you won’t lose them.

When the captured fleas jump as they were created by God to do, they inevitably bang their heads on the lid of your jar. “Ouch”, they cry, “that really hurt.”

After the fleas have jumped and hit their little heads five or six times, they will eventually catch on. They will think in their tiny flea brains, “If I don’t jump so high, then I won’t bump my head on the lid.” And voila, you have trained your fleas.

After their discovery, the fleas will only jump a few inches, to just under the lid where they remember cracking their heads before. Even if you were to remove the lid, the fleas would never try to jump out of the jar.

Their potential is limited because of a painful memory. You have in your jar trained fleas — trained to think with limits.

Vision, like a fertile peach stone, gets us out of the shell and like zealous, energetic fleas, out of the jar. Vision sees beyond the present limitations and makes the limitless future an attainable reality.

I’ll come back to the subject of vision next week and give six steps to attaining new heights in the future.