I Have a Dream, Too

Dreaming about the future doesn’t come natural for me. I’m not much of a dreamer. I’m also not much of a visionary, so any dream I do come up with doesn’t have much impact on the world or my country or even my neighborhood. But I’m starting to dream a big dream for my children—and at the same time realizing the intentionality that it will require from me.

Here’s my projection about the future: With a lot of hard work and by the grace of God, my children will grow up knowing the value of a full night’s sleep, eating at least occasionally from the four food groups, giving good effort, and respecting others. They will have good enough grades to get into good enough colleges and good enough social skills to have good enough friendships. They will have reasonably good manners, good credit, good personal boundaries, and a sense of personal responsibility. With even more of God’s grace, they will have marriages that last, careers that are steady (even fulfilling), and church attendance that is respectable.

These are good things. These are down-on-my-knees-grateful kinds of things. But they’re also cultural things. And the rub for me is that God transcends culture. I recently learned the phrase “cultural captivity.” It means being trapped by one’s culture into certain beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors. So many of the things our culture describes as “good” are completely out of whack with what we know is important to God (at least if we believe the Bible). Even Christian culture has absorbed many of these beliefs, so that pastors now compete with each other over the size of their churches, and Christian moms become frantic—scary frantic—about how many Scriptures their kids can memorize or how many shoeboxes they can fill for Operation Christmas Child.

My big dream is that my kids will not be captives to our culture and its definition of "the good life." To some extent, I know it’s unavoidable, but in the big areas—how they define their life’s purpose and successes, even how they spend their time—I pray that culture would not be their guide. I pray that Christian culture would not be their guide. I pray that the Spirit of God and the examples He’s given us in Scripture would guide their way. That they’ll feed the hungry. That they’ll preach good news to the poor. That they’ll set the captives free. These are the things to which Jesus gave his 33 years of life on earth. And what do my kids see me giving my life to? Hmmmm.

The scariest part of my big dream is that it begins with a change in me.