The Dotted Line

I was recently stirred as I listened to my dear friend, Diane Brask, speak at our missions conference. She shared how God first spoke to her when she was at Bethal college. Billy Graham was concluding his message by challenging the students to push aside their agenda on which they wanted God to sign their dotted line on the bottom of their page. He said to turn the page over and give him the blank side and sign on God's dotted line.

As Diane did that God spoke to her and told her that He had wanted her to be a youth pastor rather than a social worker. She argued, then listened and now she is traveling into the nations of the world, reaching many unreached people's groups.

Her testimony inspired the following poem.



The Dotted Line
By Lydia Chorpening

My page was all scribbled with hasty scrawls
The notes I had made ran over each other
My thoughts have been scattered and randomly strewn
I’d doodled with doodad—a bunch of clutter
And then I asked God to
Sign on my dotted line

I’d written my own path of craziness
My heart was only half-set on God’s divine plan
But I had failed to still my heart before I wrote
Thus my page was puttered with the ambition of man
And I still asked God to
Sign on my dotted line

But now God’s grace is speaking to me
To get rid of the page that’s cluttered
To pull out a new page that’s void of my plans
And hand him that blank page—it’s really another
And here He’s asking me to
Sign on His dotted line