Rise Up You Dreamers

For my entire life I have completely taken the freedom to dream for granted.

Not the kind you get in the night during REM sleep, but rather the ones that start when you are a child and want to be an astronaut that later mature into a beautiful house with mahogany furniture. In the States we are encouraged to not only dream those far-fetched things, but are also taught that they are possible. We’re fed those one-in-a-million stories that tell us with a bit of work and luck we can achieve anything we have ever wanted to. We’re told that we are special, that we are unique and that we can change the world.

Turns out that not everyone around the world can still dream- and that breaks my heart.

For our ministry this month we partnered with a local church. The pastor described his vision for a program called “We are Builders of Dreams” that is all about dreaming big dreams. He told us of how many of his people are afraid to dream anymore because they have been told their entire lives that they are a slave to their circumstances. They are taught to be practical and given a lot of responsibility at a young age and have to deal with things you and I could never imagine.

I saw this so clearly in my art students. When I would ask then to draw the dream they held closest to their hearts; the most impossible one and would get very practical answers to do with careers their parents did. They couldn’t see a future outside what they already knew and has been told so many times that’s all they are worth. Their self confidence was so low that they would ask for direction in the tiniest details so they could please me instead if making their art what they liked. They reacted in surprise to compliments and were so shy, not making eye contact.

I did see dreams left still in a little boy named Luis. He would come to class with his two older sisters who would smile at me bashfully. Luis though, about 5, would never crack a smile and the one time he did he immediately smothered it. When I asked Luis to draw his dream he drew a beautiful castle in colored pencil and then a figure with a crown in front of it. When I asked him about it, he looked me in the eye and quietly said his dream was to be a prince and live in a castle, daring me to refute him. I could only tell him it was perfect and pray he never lost his ability to dream.

Dreams provide us with the opportunity to create reality. They encourage us to keep striving, to keep asking for more, and help us to keep heart. In this world there is so much brokenness and so much pain that I don’t understand. I dream of a world that’s free from corruption, from poverty, from all of the hurt and often this dream fuels my desire to help. Even in the smallest of ways, perhaps I can change just one person’s life for the better and bring joy.

In Ecclesiastes 3:11 it says that God has placed eternity into the heart of man and that we cannot comprehend His plan from beginning to end. God has created us with a desire for something more, a feeling that all is not right in the world from the beginning of time. Sin has tainted the perfection He created us for, but He provided a way for us to know Him again- the death and resurrection of Christ. So here we are in this fallen world homesick for the courts of heaven like in Psalm 84, but He has given His children a charge: to first love Him with everything and then others as we do ourselves (Matthew 22:36-40). We have a short life- described in the bible as a puff of mist in light of eternity- but a significant call and a desire for something more in our hearts that points us to eternity for an answer.

So keep dreaming and keeping building the dreams of those who are around you. As we feed that innate desire for something more we can be assured that there truly is a kingdom in heaven and one day all those longings will be fulfilled if we are God’s children.

My prayer for you and all those I come into contact with this year is that a beautifully impossible dream will be sparked in your heart that leads you straight to the Father: the One True King of the Impossible.