Walking the path

(3-minute read)

Where do my dreams come from? I don’t mean the ones when I’m sleeping but the dreams I have when I’m wide awake.

After my sophomore year of high school, I asked my parents if I could attend art school during the summer break. There was something about art that always drew me. It wasn’t about being rich and famous. Despite their tremendous talent, all of the professional artists I knew or knew of were unknown and poor. I joined classes at a commercial art school near my home five days a week. I wasn’t cut out for commercial art; I only wanted to paint people.

As summer ended and I needed to leave the commercial art school, one of the instructors showed my work to the head of a fine arts school in a neighboring town. I was invited to attend, and my parents agreed to drive me once a week to evening classes. I felt out of place in the class. The skills of all the other students were far more advanced than mine. I was forced to drop out after one of my high school teachers thought art was too much of a distraction for me. I eventually discovered that the dream was more about people than about art.

It’s hard to discuss where the dream came from because words like body, soul, and spirit mean different things to different people. In my mother’s womb, the Lord attached the real me to my human body. I drew life from that body even though it was a temporary body, only meant for one human lifetime. Like everyone else, I needed to be connected to the permanent source of life, the Lord. Then, when my body dies, I still live on.

I used to wonder why God didn’t create us already connected to him. It took me a while to understand that God wanted us to love him like he loves us. Love is always voluntary; if not, it isn’t love.

I’d done so many things wrong in my life that I didn’t deserve the love of God. In his infinite mercy, God showed his love for me by sending his son, Jesus, to be attached to a human body like I was, live a normal human life as I should, doing what he saw God doing, saying what he heard God saying, and trusting God in all things as I should. He made up for everything I had done wrong by sacrificing himself. He then allowed me to say “Yes” to voluntarily receive the results of that sacrifice, which connected me to the Lord. God’s love and all he had done for me made me want to apologize.

The Lord uniquely made the real me, who was attached to my body in my mother’s womb. It’s like driving a car. If someone bumps into my car, I say, “They bumped into me.” My car has all sorts of gadgets, such as navigation systems and electronic intelligence, to help me drive safely. If those things get damaged and fail to work, I’m personally not damaged.

In the same way, if my human body becomes defective at my age as my memory is getting a bit slower, Alzheimer’s is always a concern. If that happens to me, the real me will remain unchanged. I may not have the same abilities to communicate or move. Still, I will be undamaged when the Lord separates me from this body.

Our dreams are sparked from time to time by opportunities. Dreams sometimes seem like silly things. It’s so easy to set them aside or alter them for something that I think is more sensible and, therefore, more important. That uniqueness God gave me changed how I see myself and the world. It causes me to dream dreams that are different from others. Those dreams compete with the dreams made by my body’s mind. Dreams of becoming rich and famous, dreams born out of envy, revenge, and anger, are obviously from my brain and not that uniqueness God gave me. I’ve spent much of my life trying to discern which dreams are flesh and which are spirit. I must often ask, “Is this the dream the Lord gave?”

God made me so I would have unique dreams for his purposes and our purposes together. Our dreams should never be ignored. They are one of the ways God calls me to the place he’s prepared for me.