Visions and Dreams

The ancient prophet recorded God as saying:  “Where there is no vision, the people perish” (Prov 29:18, KJV).  And later, in the New Testament, God is recorded as saying:  “This will happen in the last days….your young men (and women) shall see visions and your old men (and women) shall dream dreams” (Acts 2:17-18).

Arenal Volcano, Costa Rica

The seeing of visions and the dreaming of dreams sounds so otherworldly, so redundant in our world today.  Yet, we will perish without visionaries and dreamers who have the capacity to see new possibilities, new combinations of what is and what can be, and to see now, in imagination, that which is not yet but which ought to be.

What’s the use of dreaming or envisioning something new and different?  Most of us see what is—the status quo—the way it really is, we say.  But is it?  Is it what really is?  This morning I ask myself, “What is the real future?”  Does what is happening now in the present contain within it the possibility of a new world totally different from the one we now know?  I think so.  But it will take dreamers and visionaries to make it happen.

I believe that the vision I see (“a friendly world of friendly folk beneath a friendly sky”)—so different from what is—is real.  I see that which ought to be but is not yet.  And because it ought to be, I believe, by faith, that it will be.