I recently picked up A Guide to Prayer, a book that was given to me, July 1987, on my first anniversary in full-time vocational ministry. One person – Charlotte Gilmour – noticed I had been at the church a year. I’ve read and prayed with the book many times and each time thought of Charlotte and her kindness. This weekend, I reread some of the pages I had marked. Here is an excerpt that I really needed:

Dream Lofty Dreams

The dreamers are the saviors of the world. As the visible world is sustained by the invisible, so men, through all their trials and sins and sordid vocations, are nourished by the beautiful visions of their solitary dreamers. Humanity cannot forget its dreamers; it cannot let their ideals fade and die; it lives in them; it knows them as the realities which it shall one day see and know.

Composer, sculptor, painter, poet, prophet, sage, these are the makers of the after-world, the architects of heaven. The world is beautiful because they have lived; without them, laboring humanity would perish….

Cherish your visions; cherish your ideals; cherish the music that stirs in your heart, the beauty that forms in your mind, the loveliness that drapes your purest thoughts, for out of them will grow all delightful conditions, all heavenly environment; of these, if you but remain true to them, your world will at last be built.

To desire is to obtain; to aspire is to achieve. Shall man’s basest desires receive the fullest measure of gratification, and his purest aspirations starve for lack of sustenance? Such is not the law: such a condition of things can never obtain: “Ask and receive.”

Dream lofty dreams, and as you dream, so shall you become. Your Vision is the promise of what you shall one day be; your Ideal is the prophecy of what you shall at last unveil.

The greatest achievement was at first and for a time a dream. The oak sleeps in the acorn; the bird waits in the egg; and in the highest vision of the soul a waking angel stirs. Dreams are the seedlings of realities.

—From As a Man Thinketh by James Allen, in A Guide to Prayer for Ministers and Other Servants

and now…one of my favorite cartoons:

"Follow your dreams," says the Guru on the Mountain. Frank (or maybe Ernest) responds, "Even the one where I go to school in my underwear?"