What is the Church? Part 3: A Dream

"Jesus made his church out of human beings with more or less the same mixture in them of cowardice and guts, of intelligence and stupidity, of selfishness and generosity, of openess of heart and sheer cussedness as you would be apt to find in any of us...it is a point worth remembering." -Frederick Buechner

"I have a dream today. I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together." -Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. 

I have entertained a passion for daydreaming most of my life. They have been dreams of football glory, car chases, my last days. and kissing the most beautiful girl in the world (that one came true).  I could spends hours sitting in the grass, peering into the sky dreaming of flying.  In some way, these dreams came to life in me.  I'm keenly aware that I am far from alone in this endeavor of dreaming but I wonder, what drives us to fantasize so?

Our dreams can in fact have a very negative effect on us, causing us to become disenfranchised with reality.  In the recent blockbuster, Inception, the deep-dream escapades become a sort of drug, a way to escape and in extreme cases, characters were unable to tell the difference between the dream and reality.  I perceive that this is not far from the truth.  We can believe in something so much that although it is not real, our faith gives body to our illusions. On a smaller note, we often dream just beyond the grasps of our realities leaving us always hungry. But we dream on.

And I pray that this continued dreaming is good.  Dreaming allows us a chance to reshape our hopes, to believe that escape is not the answer but that victory can be grasped.  We must dream new dreams when the world declares that we are bound to our dismal lots.  Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. most exemplified the power of a dream, a dream that dared to hope for freedom, a rainbow colored hill filled with the songs of every nation hand in hand.  His was an unrealistic dream, but because he not only dared to dream it, but to share it as well, a new reality was unleashed.  So we dream on.

Each of us was meant to ponder the stars and the language of that pondering is that of the dream.  Yet as we gaze into the heavens, our feet hold firm to the dirt beneath it.  It is only then, with our heads in the sky and our feet on the ground that our dreams can gain traction.  We must deal with reality as it is, not as it should be but also dream for reality not as it should be but as it will be.  We are indeed complex human beings and within us is the power to kill and the power to give life.  So we must choose what our lives will say, what our hands will do.  And we dream on.

The day is soon approaching when with new eyes we shall at last see the beauty of ugly things, when our starving neighbor will hunger no more, when the man who lives down the road says goodbye to loneliness forevermore, when no child will have to suffer the fate of being fatherless.  There is a day coming, soon I pray, when unrelenting rain will fall on our parched hearts, when we no longer judge one another on any basis at all but by love. Do I dare dream on?

May we look at our hopes of restoration and repair and see them not as unrealistic, but share them till a new reality is unleashed and then, perhaps, we will dream a new dream.