What did He do when He saw this? Maybe it would help us in dealing with our own broken dreams if we could only see what He did.

He did three things, as well as we can tell.

First, He held on to His faith in the sovereignty of God.

He continued to believe that God knew what He was doing and that God would work things out the way God wanted them worked out.

That is a big step to take, and it is not usually an easy one. Our first inclination, when things go wrong with our dreams, is to turn on God, to say that God must not be there at all or God wouldn't permit things to go this way for us. The woman who loses her job, the man whose wife has just died in an operation, the young person who feels that he or she is not making any headway in life naturally becomes angry with God and says, "What good have all my prayers been? Why should I bother being religious if you don't help me when I need you?"

Maybe Jesus did this at first. We don't know. But we do know that He couldn't have done it for long. He went right on with His ministry, teaching and healing and trusting that God knew what God was doing, even if things didn't turn out the way He wanted them to.

And people ever since have found inspiration in Jesus' faith, in His holding on to belief in God's power even when God wasn't exercising it in His behalf.

In Philip Crosbie's book March Till They Die, Crosbie tells of the forced march of many European and American prisoners of war when the U.N. forces were driving the North Koreans back in November of 1950. Although most of the prisoners were starving and ill, they had to walk as much as twenty miles a day, often in subfreezing weather. Along the way, they saw American G.I.'s who were emaciated and unable to keep up with their prisoner groups. They sometimes passed G.I.'s and their guards beside the road. Then they heard shots and knew the prisoners had been executed. Crosbie and his friends would pass as closely to the next G.I.s as they could, and as slowly as they dared, would whisper to them, "God is near us in this dark hour. His love is real. His mercy is real. His forgiveness is real. His reward is waiting for us."

All those broken dreams -- and God was there, as real as ever, just as He was in Jesus' final days.

Jesus held on to His faith in the sovereignty of God, and He prayed and submitted Himself to the will of the Father.

That's what the whole business of Gethsemane was about -- "Not my will, but thy will be done." Only it didn't begin in Gethsemane. It had been going on for a long time before that. Luke says that when they went to Gethsemane that night to pray, it was their "custom." They prayed somewhere like that every night.

That's a wonderful lesson for when things are going wrong, isn't it? Not to cavil at God for it but to yield to God in humble submission, to say, "God, I don't understand this, but I will do whatever you want me to do in the situation." What a difference it would make in our lives if we only lived this way!