Dream On

        Do you dream? I have had conflicting thoughts on dreams.  Will my dreams carry me too far away from reality?  What if I push all of my dreams away, what will I have left to hope in? Even as I know that I have been called into this time to live, I cannot help but dream.  

Dreaming can be a coping mechanism - a way to turn on the television screen of our minds and let it take us away from our monotony and pain.  But I find that dreams can also ground us in the truth.  

Jesus told us He came not to be the panacea for all of life’s pain but to give us life more abundantly.  He said, “I came that they may have life and have it abundantly.”  An abundance of something is a generous amount.  He takes our life here and expands it to encompass eternity.  And this is why we dream.  

                                                 

Elais' imaginative drawings ~ they always tell a story.

Dream worlds are a sign that our souls belong to more than what we can see.  We are not satisfied with what this world has to offer.  There are things we want to forget, run away from, and not accept.  There is inequity, loss, pain, suppression, and death here.  Death and dying, in all facets of life, has invaded what should have been a beautiful existence. 

While we are living out our days here on terra-firma we must dream; without it our souls suffocate.  Stories of dreaming souls are all around us.  Corrie ten Boom’s soaring lark that took her spirit up to the heights as Nazi prison guards beat and persecuted frail women all around her.  Harriet Tubman’s angelic visions of smiling, caring women in white, who reached out to the rough unwanted hands of a slave girl.  C.S. Lewis’ magical world where a great and terrible lion makes mean and selfish children into kings and queens of a fairy land by the sea.  These dreamers kept their troubled souls alive on thoughts of what could be, on what should be. 

No one dreams up more stuff than these three!

When we dream, we often touch what will be.  Without this sense of what is to come, we are easily drug down into the shadows.  Dreams of a new heaven and new earth enlarge our purpose here, giving us life more abundantly in the waiting world.  Even the world itself is yearning and groaning for its newness to come. A redemption awaits. 

And as I wait, I dream of the people I will one day hold again.  I dream of the hardest and most disfigured people I know, healed and made whole.  I dream of seeing the many things that I cannot change here,  perfected in Eternity.  I dream of the time and the conversations and the creations that await me one day.  I dream of no more separation but only unifying wholeness.  
       And I know that these dreams will be because I know the One who calls me to dream.  He is keeping all of these things just as He is keeping me until that Day.  And so, I am quieting my soul, learning to see through a glass darkly.  I am a watchman waiting for the morning; waiting for that dawn where my faith will be my eyes. 

Bella fulfilling some of her musical dreams

~ Your Fellow Sojourner

C. S. Lewis on writing fairy tales for children...

" Since it is so likely that they will meet cruel enemies, let them at least have heard of brave knights and heroic courage.  Otherwise you are making their destiny not brighter but darker. Nor do most of us find that violence and bloodshed, in a story, produce any haunting dread in the minds of children. As far as that goes, I side impenitently with the human race against the modern reformer. Let there be wicked kings and beheadings, battles and dungeons, giants and dragons, and let villains be soundly killed at the end of the book.”