I am a dreamer. I love ideas. I used to keep a dream journal and would read it to my friends and family but that ended quickly because here’s the truth about dreams: they don’t make sense to other people.

Have you ever tried to explain a dream to someone? Dreams are weird. Dreams are our brains defragmenting our hard drive and playing with concepts and images and emotions and thoughts we have. If we’re honest, we find that we’re not really all that logical. We largely let our emotions rule us. Sure we have reasons for our emotions, but they aren’t all logical. Or they have a logic all of their own which are immune to any philosophic system.

Dreams don’t make sense to other people. Yet we love spending time with dreamers after they’ve come up with something cool. No one paid much attention to these two guys named Steve. They would hang out in their parents’ garage and play with computers. One dude would program, the other guy would just dream and tell the programmer what to do. They started selling a computer that people thought was cool, so the world started to take notice of them.

Yet Dreamer Steve would set people off. Programmer Steve was a nice guy. Predictable and boring and a solid engineer. Yet Dreamer Steve was always saying “No” to people and pushing them to achieve his dreams. Once, Programmer Steve confronted Dreamer Steve when he pushed too far. “You don’t program, you don’t code, you don’t even know half of what you’re asking us to do! Just who do you think you are?! What is it that you do?!”

And Dreamer Steve spoke about the orchestra. How the composer had a dream and put it on paper. And the violins and the cellos don’t need to know what the trumpets or the drums are doing to make that dream a reality. “And I,” said Dreamer Steve. “I don’t play an instrument. You’re right. What I am… I am the conductor, and the conductor plays the orchestra!”

You might have heard of these two Steves, maybe some of you have their products on your person right now. Steve Wozniacki and Steve Jobs. Their computer company: Apple.

I have been fascinated by Steve Jobs and his ability to dream because he could punch above his weight class. He would have folks think differently about things.

One designer kept wanting a stylus, a pen that would interact with the screen with this iPhone/iPad thing that Apple was designing. Jobs argued that a stylus could get lost and it’s not needed. The designer pointed out that there were no other options as some sort of pen would have to be used to interact with the computer and the user. Jobs held up his hands and said, “I have 5 stylus right here. Figure out a way to use these first.” And walked away. That design team had to invent something brand new. And even then Jobs didn’t like the screen because his keys scratched the surface of it. So they had to invent Guerrilla Glass six weeks before the iPhone was released to the masses.

Jobs wasn’t liked or admired. He wasn’t liked or admired partly because of his personality and partly because of the truth about dreams. Dreams don’t make sense to other people, not until they can see and share the dream.

That’s Israel’s problem as well. The people of Israel have a dream. A dream they claim was sent to them by their weird belief in ONE God. We gentiles understand that there’s a god for everything. Gods for concepts like war and wisdom, gods for nature like storms and sea, and gods we don’t even know what they do! Yet these Israelites have been beaten by the Egyptians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, and Romans and they still claim to follow ONE god.

Furthermore, their dream is to be a blessing to the world. In Exodus 19:5-6 this one God appoints Israel to be a nation of priests, “Now therefore, if you will indeed obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my treasured possession among all peoples, for all the earth is mine; and you shall be to me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.”

Instead of trying to crush the world, these people will bless it. The Bible is not written by winners, it is written by the losers. It is not written from the point of the powerful, but the powerless. It is not written by the bullies, but by the bullied. Israel knows it can’t win in the arms race, so it will win by blessing. From that nation comes one who seeks to take that dream to the next level! Jesus has a dream where the poor have good news, the sick are healed, those oppressed go free, and everyone knows that God favors them. This is revolutionary!  But people don’t understand dreams… and we killed him for it. We still pay the old game of command and conquer, and we add Jesus’ name to a game he refused to play. Yet the witness still remains to this other way of living. A counter-narrative to the cruel way we tend to live our lives. Instead of an eye for an eye, the dream is to turn the other cheek. Instead of hating our enemies, the dream is the pray for them and do good to those who harm us. Instead of living with our prejudices, the dream is to welcome the stranger, outcast, and “other.”

This Psalm is called, “A Harvest of Joy.” People who were often in sorrow wrote it. They have an entire book called Lamentations. No matter what happens, Israel never lost the dream. They have doubted it, argued with it, and betrayed it. As have we, the heirs of that dream through Jesus Christ. But the dream still lives on. The church needs to be a place of dreams.

Recently I heard of a youth pastor in Vancouver, Washington. His church was in a blighted part of town and the congregation wasn’t doing so well. It looked like if the budget didn’t improve, his job would be eliminated. He looked at his youth group and saw kids who didn’t have purpose. Couldn’t get jobs because their parents never taught them how to interview or land a job as many parents couldn’t land jobs themselves. He looked at the old homes and the unkempt lawns and he had a dream.

What if the church trained the kids on basic business skills? What if the church could mentor the kids? The congregation had a lot of business owners in it. The dream was to take the kids over the summer and train them up so they could mow and keep up with neighborhood lawns. Soon, MOWTOWN was born.[1] The residents could buy into this program at a minimal fee for weekly mowing services. The youth pastor also set up a 501c3 where the community could donate and offset any costs. This was an immediate success. Local business owners saw this promise of the dream, so they promised any kid from MOWTOWN a job at the end of their summer program. It’s an amazing program that impacts the lives of the youth as well as the community.

Listen, there’s no greater feeling than turning your dream into a reality. You see something, you get a vision, you see how it COULD be and once you see, you can’t unsee. You go for it. You fail. You try again. People say no, you keep going. You find the resources, you balance the budget, you get the donors, you develop a strategy, you get the word out, and the dream puts on flesh and dwells among the people.

Churches that are engaged in dreaming and turning those dreams into a reality are vibrant and exciting places to be. Many churches like the same ol’ same ol’, which can be boring. I can’t think of a worse witness to the dream of Christ than boring people with it. Many churches devolve not because of power-struggles or petty fights not because the stakes are too high, but because they are too low.

When I dream of what we can do together here… of lives changed… of living our faith that impacts each and everyone one of us from old to young and helps out our city and far-flung corners of the globe… I get goose bumps. I have a lot of ideas… But my dreams aren’t important because if I told you of the specifics you wouldn’t understand as dreams don’t make sense to other people.

I’m more interested in talking with you and dreaming with you and coming up with a shared vision that will restore our fortunes and fill our mouths with laughter and our tongues with shouts of joy and we will be like those who dream… And it will be said among the region, “The Lord has done great things for them.” May it be so. Amen.

[1] https://www.faithandleadership.com/mowtown-teen-lawn-care-social-enterprise-offering-new-model-youth-ministry