“Looking at the stars always makes me dream.” —Vincent Van Gogh
Dreaming out loud is not easy. It is casting a vision for what might be. It is casting your heart into the world to catch what has captured you.
It gives voice to the depths of your heart and soul and tells the world that you care about something.
That’s what dreaming is about: caring. When you dream of achieving a goal or being a success or changing the world, in essence, you say that you care how things turn out.
But dreaming is risky. At times, it makes me anxious. I’d rather hide my dreams or pretend I don’t care about things. Some of it stems from the potential for failure: It’s possible that what I care about and hope for will turn out completely opposite from the way I’d like. I’m often tempted to put my dreams to rest, to death, in order to minimize my potential disappointment—to minimize the potential shame for voicing my preference and then failing to see it come about.
Risk is scary, tempting me to snuff out my dreams and keep quiet, to keep to myself. This may be the most insidious of sins, this sin of indifference. Indifference weighs on my dreams like a wet blanket, dampening them, making them too heavy to fly free. It clouds the holy in this commonplace vessel—Christ in me. The Messiah redeems me from indifference so that I might be free to care.
I need practice in battling indifference. My caring muscles are sore with sin. Slowly, ever so slowly, Jesus is awakening my caring, prompting me to exercise it. He is teaching me to look up, away from my own concerns, to care for more than my own skin.
