Dream

Are you a dreamer? Are you someone who goes to bed at night and has visions of things to come, things past, things hoped for, things feared, things loved? Then you, my friend, are a person in whom something holy is at work. 

To dream requires something outside of the present moment. It requires something beyond what you know that you have. It takes imagination, the ability to see beyond what's right in front of you. It takes a willingness to look for what you cannot yet see. And I'm not just talking good dreams - all dreams require this. If you have bad dreams, fearful dreams, whatever, that requires an ability to look honestly at your own life and know fear, remorse, sorrow. 

These are all God-given things. These are holy things. These are sacred things. And if you don't believe me, turn to the prophet Micah, for it is his words I'm drawing from. 

In Micah 3, he says that those who are in darkness away from God don't dream. 

They don't dream. Those who find themselves in a place walled off from the light of God, in their darkness, they do not dream. When the sun sets and they close their eyes, there's no vision to paint a picture for them. Without God, they have no hope. No imagination. No honest reflection on their lives. And why should they? 

This is, I think, one of the greatest challenges for our culture right now. With so many turning away from God and focusing their entire lives on human ability or personal pleasure or whatever, we've lost our ability to dream. We can't see any more beyond our present circumstances or our limited scope, and we just don't dream. 

We don't think about the way things ought to be or even how things could be; we're stuck at the way things are. We don't think about whether we hurt someone yesterday or whether we should have done something differently; we've moved on from that and only have today. We don't think about what could be good and beautiful tomorrow; how can we? Today sucks every bit of life that we have to give it and leaves us nothing left for something like tomorrow. Here, now, today, this...it's all we've got when we don't have a God who gives us, truly, eternity. 

That's the gift. That's the blessed gift that He gives us. He gives us eternity, which gives us more than just our present. It gives us our past and His past and all of history and it gives us the future and His Promise and all the tomorrows we can think of. It gives us imagination and introspection and sorrow and hope and nostalgia and fear and the full range of human emotion and experience. That's the holy gift. It's something sacred. 

Apart from God, we don't have any of it. We just have darkness. And in darkness, we cannot dream. 

Close your eyes. What vision dances in your darkness? What dream stirs your heart? That's holy. That's sacred. That's God.