“Dream” is a word I have loved and engaged with since I was a child, a word that I have spent a lifetime exploring. And, as I near 50, it’s a word I hardly understand. It holds the potential for wonder and hope, and also sorrow and disappointment.

For me, it’s become such a powerfully vulnerable word that some days I weary of using it, and yet every time I talk to my Father, He asks me to dream with Him. It seems to be the only thing on His mind these days.

As I look again upon a New Year, I am less sure about how to dream with God than ever before, and more sure it’s what I am on this planet to do.

I continue to discover that Acts 2:17 is true; that dreaming is an old man’s game. But the older I get the more I learn that only children can truly play it.

Dreaming is for children who have chased down vision, failed, lived through disillusionment, disappointment, loss, sorrow, and endless rejection, and still surrender their hearts to the wonder, innocence, kindness, transforming power, and goodness of Love.

“Old men dream dreams.” That’s the scripture, but it’s not about age, it’s about a journey into revelation–an awakening to a great affection for ourselves and our neighbors; it’s about loving His creation.

Dreaming is not a pretty concept, or a good principle, neither is it a brash leap or the optimistic bent; it is grace lived out, it is hope differed and promises fulfilled. (see Prov 13:12)

Only a person who has experienced the death of a dream has access to resurrection. And those words are prettier than the experience.

And so, as I enter a new year, I pray to know resurrection life, and not just for me and mine, but for you as well. I pray you would awaken to all our Father has for you. I pray you would dream “old men dreams” with the abandonment of a child and experience the wide-open places of God’s measureless love.

Even as we count the cost, I raise my glass to 2022 and say, “And if by chance it seems we’ve failed, then here’s to bigger dreams.” 

Happy New Year!

…

One night, nearly twenty years ago, just on the other side of loss, I went for a walk with a friend. As we walked through a field we dreamed of resurrection life. A year later I released a song that was the beginning of that promise fulfilled. I thought I’d share it with you.

Jason Clark is a bestselling storyteller who writes to reveal the transforming kindness of the love of God in a world traumatized by the religious abuses done in the name of the love of God. He and his wife, Karen, live in North Carolina with their three children, Madeleine, Ethan, and Eva.