The Mississippi River taught me about dreams.
About halfway through our 1500-mile journey I crossed OLD CHAIN OF ROCKS BRIDGE in St Louis. The view from that historic bridge prompted these thoughts.
I’m noticing a lot about the river as I live with it.
I’ve lived in the Midwest a lot of my life. I can’t imagine how many times I’ve crossed the Mississippi River without paying much attention. At freeway speeds, it’s there one moment and gone the next.
But when you travel along its length, you have time to notice stuff. Small stuff, subtle changes, things you don’t see from the bridges. You realize that the river isn’t constant, that it’s not just a big ribbon of water.
The river has a life of its own, and you can only perceive its nature by being with it for a while. Drive-by encounters won’t do.
I think dreams work like that. When you pass by someone’s dream, it’s pretty hard to understand it. There’s a lot going on that you just can’t see from the bridge at highway speed.
I think perhaps that’s why others’ dreams are sometimes so hard to understand. When you live with a dream, it looks a lot different than it appears on a quick drive-by. Maybe the idea that seems crazy from the bridge at freeway speed makes more sense when you travel with it a while.
Maybe we should be a bit slower to judge the worthiness of a dream based on its appearance as we intersect its path.
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I tend to jump to conclusions. Maybe you do, too.
Perhaps we can both learn something from the river. That big dream–whether it’s your’s or another’s–that seems so crazy and unreasonable and irrational?
Maybe if we gave it a chance, hung out with it a while, it might look a bit different.
God works like that, I think. If we give Him a chance, hang out with Him, impossible starts sounding like inevitable, and you do something crazy like riding a handcycle 1500 miles.