You’ve got to have a dream. If you don’t have a dream how you going to have a dream come true?

Are you singing yet? Good. 

All of my life dreams came true the year I turned 25. I was commissioned as a Salvation Army officer, started running a Prayer Beacon (dream job), got married, and was pregnant within a few months. A lot of life happened in a very small space of time. I’ve spent the last three years living the dream, working out in practise the dreams that have come true. It’s not all been easy, but it’s been fullness. 

And now I’m feeling God stirring my heart to dream again. As I’ve been dreaming, I keep feeling God push me to up the stakes, to dream bigger, wilder, with more imagination, more creativity.

The more I think and listen and pray about this dreaming thing, the more excited I get, the more hope-filled that the world can and will, and must change. That we can dream amazing and beautiful things. That God wants and wills to do immeasurably more than all we can ask or imagine. That he is so invested in our dreams because they come from his heart.

It’s God's will for the world to be saved, for us to live out our covenants and commitments whole heartedly, for the earth the be filled with the knowledge of God as the waters cover the sea. Those things are not unreasonable, unlikely things that will never be – they are the dream of God’s heart, and so when we dream them too, they are closer to being than they were before. It’s a way of us saying, ‘your will be done’. I’m convinced that wild dreaming and big plans are God’s desire for us. That we offend him when we live small, and think small things of ourselves and our potential. The Message puts it like this, ‘God can do anything, you know—far more than you could ever imagine or guess or request in your wildest dreams!’ (Ephesians 3:20)

C.S. Lewis writes, “It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.”

And so, I’m not only dreaming for The Salvation Army, I’m dreaming for Banbury. I’m dreaming for my corps: Banbury Prayer Beacon, I’m dreaming for myself. At the moment in Banbury amongst the churches there’s a real palpable sense of anticipation, a coming together of united dreaming and vision. God is moving and we are about to see amazing things.

I keep hearing this over and over in my head at the moment:

'Look at the nations and watch — and be utterly amazed.


Something is coming. 

We’ve been trying to put off planning and working on where we go from here with our Sabbath year too soon as we don’t want to miss out on the good things that God is doing while we rest. We don’t want to get ahead of ourselves doing next year’s work while we should be fully present, be still.

But I’ve been reminded that dreaming is an intrinsically restful pursuit. We dream when we sleep, we can daydream only when we switch off. You can’t dream when you’re feeling stressed out, when you’re bone weary, when your head is too busy.

 We’re well into our Sabbath year now, and feeling the urge to dream. God is speaking to our people from Acts 2:

“‘In the last days, God says, I will pour out my Spirit on all people. Your sons and daughters will prophesy, your young men will see visions, your old men will dream dreams. Even on my servants, both men and women, I will pour out my Spirit in those days, and they will prophesy.’” (Acts 2:17-18) Our people are on fire, prophesying all over the place, dreaming big dreams.

The inestimable and often incomprehensible Brueggemann has a great book on the subject called ‘Prophetic Imagination’, it’s well worth a read. He says, "It is the vocation of the prophet to keep alive the ministry of the imagination, to keep on conjuring and prophesying futures alternative to the single one the king wants to urge as the only thinkable one."

So, what are your dreams? For your life, family, work, home, travel? For your community, your impact on the kingdom of God?