i have a dream

When I visited China in June of 2011, the summer camps I attended had a procession of guest speakers, most of them drawn from the camp leadership. They talked to us about various values--integrity, honesty, virtue. We had talks on being the leaders the twenty-first century needs, on working our hardest today so we could reap benefits tomorrow. Pretty standard stuff, most of it, or at least as much as I could understand (at the first camp we were at, most lecture sessions were in Chinese. You can imagine how much I took away from those sessions. The second camp was far more enjoyable, since most of the camp was done in English, so as to help the students practice their language skills).

Most of those lectures have been lost in the tide of memory, overwhelmed by the faces of the friends I made and the few words of Chinese I managed to pick up and retain. But one of the sessions has stuck with me, and it's something that I've returned to often over the past year and a half, because it is so wonderful to think about.

The subject was about our dreams. Not the stirrings of our subconscious that come in sleep, of course--no, the daydreams, the things we fill ourselves with in our idle moments. The dearest wishes of our hearts.

The speaker talked about the essence of a dream. And it was then that he said the one thing that has most stuck with me. There is a difference between goals and dreams, he said. Goals are the things that are achievable. My goal is to go to the Children's Ministry Institute. It is something tangible, something I can actually accomplish. Your goal might be to be a doctor; it is attainable. Someone else's dream might be to become a lawyer; it, too, is attainable.

These things are not dreams, not really. They are goals, benchmarks we have set for ourselves. But they are not dreams, not really, because we can get them. A dream is something beyond that. A dream is something so crazy, so remote, so seemingly impossible in the eyes of men that it becomes almost laughable when seen for what it really is. These dreams surpass everything we can dare to hope. But that's what makes them beautiful.

Because there is a God in heaven. And this God delights in taking what seems impossible and turning it into possibility--and fact. He turns the sun backwards to give his children victory. He parts seas. He makes a hundred-year-old woman have a baby. He sends his son to earth to become a savior. He seems to revel in the impossibilities he makes fact, waiting to blow our minds time and time again, if not with what he's done directly for us, then with the sheer magnificence of the world and the universe he has created around us.

This God knows the deepest desires of your heart. He knows your Dream, no matter how crazy. And I do believe that he will fulfill them, if you believe. Perhaps not completely, perhaps not entirely in the way we'd expected. But hey, I have full confidence that he's going to give every child a home and heal every parent's heart and ensure that every part of the world is at peace and prosperous, with enough to get by on.

Hey, this is God we're talking about. He takes murderers and turns them into preachers. He's got this.