Have you ever woken up from a night full of dreams and you just lay there and wonder, “What in the world was that all about, all those crazy dreams?”
And you lay there and try to recall what it was that you saw. You try to recall exactly what it was that you heard in all of your dreams. You realize, in your dream you were trying to find something or maybe in the dream you were trying to get some place that you couldn’t get to. You may have been unprepared for something.
John Upton
|
A group of us were talking about our dreams not long ago. One of the pastors said that he had this weird dream of him standing in front of the congregation in his under clothes while he was preaching. The other pastor across table said, “Well, I had a dream that was worse than that,” and we didn’t explore any further. Dreams are really strange and bizarre things.
In some of them you can fly. In others, creatures appear. You see your parents. You see old friends. You see people you know. You see people you didn’t know. And it even gets stranger because everything gets disjointed. All of a sudden people begin to morph into other people. Places begin to morph into other kinds of places.
What do you make of all of these kinds of dreams? What do they mean? Sometimes dreams are nothing more than the brain at night doing a little house cleaning and sweeping out a lot of junk. I found that for a lot of dreams, many of them are just wonderful. They really do mean something that touches the heart because what they are is truth that comes wrapped up in images and metaphors and memories. They come wrapped up in all kinds of code. In some kind of surreal way many of our dreams are really an expression of our lives.
The book of Revelation is written in the language of dreams. Strange images appear, one after another. Events all become disjointed. One after the other, you have creatures, you have monsters, you have angels, you have animals, you have numbers, you have colors. All mentioned in some kind of metaphor. All mentioned in some kind of code. I think that what that dream of Revelation is, is really our hope that one day God’s going to recreate everything anew.
When I was with the secretary general at the United Nations last year, he said that what he loved about the Christian faith is that we believe that in the end God is going to make everything right. He found such hope in that.
Missions, for me, is participating in that dream. It’s our dream of a world made right. Missions is where we help to heal the cities, where we help to transform nations. It’s where we hope to renew creation. Missions is where we participate in the dream.
In the end what we really discover is: we are God’s dream.
John Upton ([email protected]) is executive director of the Baptist General Association of Virginia and the Virginia Baptist Mission Board. He also is president of the Baptist World Alliance.