From our October 7 edition
Dreams. When you’re a child they are fanciful. You dream of being a famous footballer or a singer, ballet star or astronaut.
When you go out on your bike you are for sure a gold medal winning prospect. When you paint a painting it’s the next Picasso.
When you bake a cake or cook a meal, you are the next Paul Hollywood or Jamie Oliver in the making.
Growing just a little older the dreams become more private. They may be much the same, but in your teens you don’t talk about them so much and practice your singing with a hairbrush in front of your bedroom mirror.
Older still and the dreams change and become a little less fantasy and a bit more reality.
You dream of a job you’ll enjoy and friends to share good times with, and those dreams morph in turn into dreams of career highs and married life with a "happy ever after".
In your middle years, when you’re working and bringing up a family, there doesn’t always seem to be an awful lot of time in the day to dream. But when you do find the time you find those dreams expanding into dreams for the world – for it to be a better place for your children to grow up in and enjoy.
Then you dream of grandchildren and of generations to come.
Does there ever come a point in life when we get too old to dream? I guess the older you get the more likely you are to feel as though your dreams might be slipping away. But that said, I know people in their 90s who are still holding pretty firmly onto their dreams.
There is J for example, who is a great supporter of the Fair Trade movement and even in her 90s campaigns and agitates for social justice worldwide. There is M, who never gives up trying to encourage people to come to faith because she recognises it’s something that has helped and inspired her throughout her life.
There’s A, who makes the most of each day while dreaming of being together again with his wife.
We can live without dreams, but it’s our dreams that add to life’s richness, and for me, those dreams are what keep us going. So to stop dreaming, is to stop living.
And if you turn to the Bible you will see that dreams have inspired generations of God’s people and led them to see and do the most amazing things and to experience the truly unbelievable.
So, as they say these days, "dream on" because life keeps opening up. And through faith, it never ends.
Susan Brown
