DREAM CYCLE

Victor Frankl, psychiatrist and Nazi concentration camp survivor stated “What a man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for some goal worthy of him. What he needs is not the discharge of tension at any cost, but the call of a potential meaning waiting to be fulfilled by him.”

Nobody likes suffering. In virtually all other eras of history, people expected to suffer as a normal part of life. But modern advances in medicine, technology, and communication have made life so easy for us that we expect to avoid difficulties and setbacks. If difficulties occur, we are shocked, and we think they should end immediately. But life doesn't work that way.
       
A dream often goes through a predictable cycle of birth, death, and resurrection. The death of a dream, then, is a normal part of the progression. If we bail out of God's dream when we come to that point, we miss the glory of the resurrection. When dreams go backward, We need to understand that God is purifying our hearts, marshaling resources, or setting up His perfect timing to accomplish His good purposes.  He's committed to take us through the curriculum He has designed specifically for us so that we learn life's most important lessons. The things that appear to be dream busters are tests.

“Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves receive from God. For just as we share abundantly in the sufferings of Christ, so also our comfort abounds through Christ. If we are distressed, it is for your comfort and salvation; if we are comforted, it is for your comfort, which produces in you patient endurance of the same sufferings we suffer (2 Corinthians 1:3–6).  Dream busters look like the end of the road, but if we trust God with them, we can experience a resurrected—purified, directed, and strengthened—dream. American revolutionary Thomas Paine wrote, "the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives everything its value."

THIS WEEK'S CHARGE:   Don't give up on a dream that you believe is dying.  Hang on for the glorious resurrection?

Excerpt From: Clay, Doug. “Dreaming in 3D.”