Dreams

In a remarkable story of perseverance and hope, a 47-year-old mother of five from Cookeville, Tennessee, has graduated from Tennessee Tech University after losing her sight in 2020. Despite the challenge of blindness, Amanda Juetten graduated magna cum laude, refusing to let her condition define her or limit her aspirations. “I want people to know that blindness doesn’t have to stop you from pursuing your dreams,” said Juetten.

Throughout her studies, she relied on assistive technology, the support of her family, and her own determination to overcome obstacles. “There were days when I felt overwhelmed, but I kept telling myself, ‘You can do this,’” she said. One professor remarked, “Her dedication to her education and her family is truly extraordinary.” Another classmate added, “She’s shown all of us what’s possible when you refuse to give up, no matter the circumstances.”

Now a proud graduate, Juetten plans to use her degree to advocate for the blind community and help others facing similar challenges. “I want to be a voice for those who feel unseen,” she explained. Her story is a testament to the power of determination and the importance of never losing sight of one’s dreams, even in the face of overwhelming odds.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Even when we refuse to let our limitations define us, we are called to trust that God’s purpose for our lives remains—He can use our greatest challenges as platforms for His glory.

When the local public transportation agency in Elizabethtown, Kentucky, received a federal grant to refurbish their headquarters, they wanted to call attention to the new upgrades. Apparently they were concerned about putting too fine a point on it, so instead they went the other way.

In a playful reference to their name, the Transit Agency of Central Kentucky, also known as TACK, installed a giant red thumbtack at the front of the entrance.

Glen Arney, CEO of TACK, said he initially considered outsourcing the job, but the only place he found was an out of state firm that wanted to charge them well over $100,000. So Arney and a few employees found a YouTube video to help them build one onsite.

At 21’ 7” tall and weighing about 3,000 pounds, the new agency addition was certified by adjudicator as holding the Guinness World Record for the largest thumbtack, beating out the previous benchmark of 19’ 8.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

Sometimes in life, God has to do something really big and obvious to get our attention.

For parents of young children, few things are as precious as a good night’s sleep—both for their child and for themselves. Yet many parents struggle with getting their little ones to bed and ensuring they get the rest they need.

A poll from the C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital sheds light on the sleep habits and challenges of children aged one to six years. Perhaps of greatest concern is that nearly one in four young kids struggle with anxiety at bedtime.

The poll, which surveyed a national sample of parents with kids under seven, found that the vast majority (90%) have a bedtime routine for their child. These routines often include:

Brushing teeth (90%)

Reading bedtime stories (67%)

Taking a bath (54%)

Praying (31%)

Talking about their day (23%)

But bedtime struggles are common, with 27% of parents describing the process of getting their child to bed as difficult. The poll identified that 23% of children were worried or anxious at bedtime and had trouble falling asleep. Once asleep, some children:

Wake up upset or crying (36%)

Move to their parents’ bed (43%)

Insist that a parent sleep in their room (31%)

Bonnie Hammer started her career in 1974 as a bottom-rung production assistant to the top of NBC Universal’s headquarters. As of 2024 she had become a Vice President. She advises younger workers to resist the lies about work, like “follow your dreams.” Instead, she shares a story about humility and hard work:

I learned my ‘workplace worth’ fresh out of graduate school when I was hired as a production assistant on a kids’ TV show in Boston. Each PA was assigned a cast member, and as the most junior employee, my cast member was Winston, an English sheepdog. My primary responsibility was to follow him around the set carrying a pooper scooper. I had two university degrees. Winston, on the other hand, was a true nepo-baby, the precious, unhouse-trained pet of one of the show’s producers. Plus, as an on-camera star, Winston out-earned me.

But while many days I felt like working for Winston was beneath me, I never showed it. I acted like I was pursuing an honors degree in pet sitting, and each poop pickup was an extra-credit opportunity. The work and the attitude paid off. When an associate producer position opened, I was promoted. I pursued a similar strategy for much of my early career: If I wanted to be a valuable asset to my colleagues and bosses, I knew I needed to add concrete value to their days by showing up, staying late and doing whatever needed to be done.

For young employees who want to feel ‘engaged’ at work, the truth is, you need to engage with your work first.

“What happens to a dream deferred?” That opening line from Harlem renaissance poet Langston Hughes has resonated with generations of African Americans over many decades because of the legacy of racism in America, and its soul-crushing propensity to dangle the specter of opportunity while keeping it perpetually out of reach.

Ed Dwight knew this reality firsthand. In 1962, Dwight was the first black man to be selected for an American astronaut training program. He spent years preparing, training, and running experiments at Edwards Air Force Base in California. Nevertheless, because of internal resistance to his inclusion into the program, Dwight was never selected for a NASA mission.

“Just like every other Black kid, you don’t get something, and you convince yourself it wasn’t that important anyway,” said Charles Bolden Jr., one of Dwight’s friends and a former NASA administrator.

After his military career concluded, Dwight eventually put it all behind him. He earned a Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Denver and eventually became an accomplished artist, with 129 memorial sculptures and over 18,000 pieces in gallery exhibits across the United States.

So, when he was invited to participate in a commercial space flight earlier this year, Dwight initially demurred. “I’m a really busy guy,” said Dwight. “It didn’t make a lot of difference to me at the time.”

But a group of current and former black astronauts intervened, and reminded him of the years he spent training to fill a role he was never allowed to consummate. Because of them, Dwight changed his mind.

And by the time Dwight achieved spaceflight on the Blue Origin vessel, he broke another historic barrier. At 90 years old, Ed Dwight became the oldest person to fly in space, surpassing the previous record holder, former Star Trek star William Shatner.

One of the men who convinced Dwight to take the flight was Victor Glover, Jr. “While he was off the planet, I was weeping. It was tears of joy and resolution,” said Glover. He’d met Dwight in 2007, after receiving one of Dwight’s sculptures at an award presentation. Only later did Glover learn Dwight’s own personal history of unfulfilled longing within NASA.

“I was in the presence of greatness and didn’t even know it,” Glover said. “Sixty years he sat with this and navigated it with dignity and grace and class, and that is impactful to me.”

Blue Origin honored Dwight by naming his seat on the mission after his NASA call sign: Justice.

Possible Preaching Angle:

God does not forget about the sacrifices that his servants make in the process of living faithfully. Do not lose heart, for God is in the business of making wrong things right again.

She is the most famous celebrity whose name you don’t know: the actress who plays Flo in all those Progressive commercials. Yes, she is a real person.

As told in the New York Times, Flo (aka Stephanie Courtney) was once a struggling comedian trying to make it big, sending in tapes of her performances to Saturday Night Live. Driving to failed auditions in a car that didn’t go in reverse—and unable to pay to get it fixed. Courtney eventually landed a small role for an insurance ad spot as a cashier.

Fast forward to today and her comedy career is still non-existent, but she makes millions of dollars a year doing what she never wanted to do for a living. Courtney may have more zeros at the end of her pay check, but her story is far from unique. Youthful aspirations so often erode into some version of settling with the hand life (and God?) has dealt you.

NYT reporter Caity Weaver asked, “Who has a better job than you?” Courtney said, “There are times when I ask myself that. The miserable me who didn’t get to audition for ‘S.N.L.’ never would have known, how good life could be when she was denied what she wanted. I hope that’s coming through. I’m screaming it in your face.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

Courtney’s story suggests something profound: it is a difficult wisdom to learn, as the Prodigal Son did, that there is something far more meaningful than the glory of what we might want for our lives. The faith that holds on to Christ simultaneously lets go of everything else.

R. Douglas Fields writes about the vigorous activity of the brain during sleep:

Midway between our unconscious and conscious minds there is the altered mental state of sleep. If you should live to the age of seventy-five, you will have spent perhaps twenty-five of those years asleep. What goes on in your head during that block of your lifetime is largely beyond your knowledge or comprehension. It is a mysterious and still mystical chunk of ourselves.

If sleep were simply a nightly hibernation, a shutting down of our system in the dark, it could be understood as a reasonable strategy to save power for the daytime when we can be physically active. Sleep might be much like a laptop computer going into temporary hibernation to save resources during long periods of inactivity. But hibernation is hardly what goes on in the human brain during sleep. Sleep is a vigorous period of brain activity. It is an altered state, not an inert state.

There are cycles and patterns of activity during our nocturnal unconscious life shuttling enormous amounts of activity through different brain circuits. Events of the day—conscious and unconscious—are reexamined, sorted, associated, filed, or discarded. Memories are moved from one place in the brain and filed in different places in our cerebral cortex according to such factors as the type of information they contain, their connections to other events, and the internal emotional states of mind stamping them with significance.

Possible Preaching Angle:

We read repeatedly in Scripture that God spoke to one servant or another in a dream, or while they slept. He even spoke to unbelievers whose actions could impact his people. Why does God choose to speak to people while they sleep? Maybe it is because they are so busy or so distracted or so obstinate while awake that he speaks to them when they are asleep.

The next frontier for advertising isn't virtual reality or holograms—it's your dreams, according to sleep researchers. And they warn, the practice could soon become a nightmare.

In an open letter, the scientists criticize the concept of dream advertising. Using audio and video clips companies engineer ads into your subconscious. They say in the letter, that not only does the practice already exist, but a beer company has even publicly tested it out during Super Bowl LV.

The sleep researchers cite a press release as an example. In it, Molson Coors Beverage Company openly admitted it could manipulate your dreams so you can collectively see visions of alcoholic beverages dancing through your head using the science of guiding dreams.

So, how exactly do marketers slither into our dreams? Molson Coors collaborated with Harvard psychiatry professor Deirdre Barrett. "Barrett worked with the Coors team to develop a stimulus film that induces relaxing, refreshing images including waterfalls, mountains, and of course, Coors."

It's easy to see where the researchers' concerns stem from as this scientific power makes its way to advertisers—especially when the advertiser offers a product with the potential to be habit-forming for consumers.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Dreams; Mind; Temptation; Thoughts; Worldliness – This technique is nothing new. Satan has been practicing influencing the minds of people for thousands of years. As believers we need to take control of our thoughts. What do you fill your thoughts with? What do you fall asleep thinking about? Focus your thinking on God (“think on these things” Phil. 4:8-9).

Philip Yancey writes about a 2019 visit to Beirut, Lebanon:

Christianity had its beginnings in this part of the world, and biblical reminders abound. Solomon purchased cedars of Lebanon to build his temple. To visit the refugee camps, we drove along the “Damascus Road,” near the site of the apostle Paul’s conversion.

Christians who work in Muslim countries speak of “MBBs” (Muslim Background Believers), their abbreviation for people raised Muslim who decide to become followers of Jesus. Some keep their new identity secret, continuing to faithfully attend the mosque. Others declare their new allegiance, which often leads to family shunning and sometimes violence. Local pastors tell of murder threats against converts. Or, a woman may have her children taken away, and be held in a kind of detention, forbidden to leave her house.

In one city, I visit a church service that includes many MBBs. The pastor says, “Please don’t take pictures. The danger to Muslim converts is real.” I ask, “Why do they take such a risk, if it’s so dangerous?”

The pastor replies, “There are two main reasons why they become Christians. Many have visions or dreams of a man in white beckoning them, and they then discover the man is Jesus. I hear this story over and over from converts. The second reason is simply love. Not so long ago this city was besieged by the Syrian army, bombed every day. Six thousand died, with many more injured. You can understand why not many volunteered to help at the Syrian camps right away.”

He leads me downstairs, to an underground parking lot:

“Once our church got to know the refugees, though, we felt compassion for them. They have lost everything, and live in a kind of limbo, people without a country. So we converted this indoor parking lot into a school that now educates 650 kids. Not all our neighbors approve—we’ve been to court many times. But Jesus' love wins.”

In the 1920s a young African American writer moved into New York City to join what became known as the Harlem Renaissance, an explosion of creativity among black artists. Through his poetry, Hughes often tried to capture the common struggles and heartaches of people in his neighborhood—like this poem simply titled "Dreams":

Hold fast to dreams,
for if dreams die,
life is a broken-winged bird that cannot fly.
Hold fast to dreams,
for when dreams go,
life is a barren field,
frozen with snow.

Some critics blasted Hughes for his negative portrayal of ordinary people, but Hughes was adamant that he wanted to write about the brokenness of ordinary people living ordinary lives. He once said that his poetry is about "workers and singers and job hunters on Lenox Avenue in New York or South State in Chicago—people up today and down tomorrow, working this week and fired the next, beaten and baffled … buying furniture on the installment plan … hoping to get a new suit for Easter and then pawning that suit before the Fourth of July." Hughes understood that life is filled with hope and beauty but sometimes it can also feel like a broken-winged bird or a barren field, frozen with snow.

The legend of the Loch Ness Monster is one that has both intrigued and disappointed thousands over the past century. One man, however, has remained a resilient sentinel at the lake since 1991, refusing to give in to disappointment. Steve Feltham arrived at Loch Ness over 32 years ago, having quit his job and sold his house in order to purchase a habitable van and "pursue his passion." A short documentary was filmed about the man who holds the Guinness World Record for the longest continuous search at Loch Ness, in which he addresses his seemingly absurd commitment. "The reason I sit here and I try to solve this mystery is because that is what makes my heart sing," he says in the film. "My life gives me freedom, adventure, unpredictability...it's a dream come true."

Editor’s Note: (2025) You can read more about his story here on the Guinness World Record web site.

Potential Preaching Angles: Sometimes we need to be reminded that following Jesus has never involved the easy, comfortable life society seems to think. Unlike Feltham's quest, following Jesus involves submitting to his Lordship and joining a community of people who are bringing Jesus to all the nations, But like Feltham, we are on a quest that has all the "freedom, adventure, [and] unpredictability" we could ever dream of.

Bert and John Jacobs, the brothers who cofounded the $100 million Life Is Good T-shirt company, grew up the youngest of six children in a lower middle-class family in Boston. When the brothers were in elementary school, their parents were in a near-death car accident from which their mother managed to escape with just a few broken bones, but their father lost the use of his right hand.

The stress and frustration from his physical therapy caused him to develop a harsh temper, they explain in their new book Life Is Good. "He did a lot of yelling when we were in grade school," John told Business Insider. And life certainly wasn't perfect. "There were often difficult things happening around the house," the brothers write.

But their mom, Joan, still believed life was good. So, every night as the family sat around the dinner table, she would ask her six kids to tell her something good that happened that day." As simple as mom's words were, they changed the energy in the room," the brothers write. "Before we knew it, we were all riffing on the best, funniest, or most bizarre part of our day."

Growing up with a mother like theirs—one who sang in the kitchen, told animated stories, and acted out children's books for them, no matter what bad situation they were going through—taught them an important lesson: Being happy isn't dependent on your circumstances. "She showed us that optimism is a courageous choice you can make every day, especially in the face of adversity."

In an interview with Esquire magazine, film producer and director J.J. Abrams (Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Lost) shared that his biggest influence as a child was his maternal grandfather, Harry Kelvin. Kelvin owned an electronics business where Abrams remembers his grandfather (in Abrams' words) "would take apart radios and telephones, all kinds of electronics, and explain why and how they worked. In a way, when I was a little kid, he was more of a father figure than my father; like most dads of that era, mine was always busy working."

Relatives said that J. J. was the son his grandpa never had. They would go on adventure walks together, walking around the neighborhood and making up stories. Esquire noted, "When you think about it, storytelling is a lot like electronics—it's all about how you take things apart and why each piece is necessary and where it fits in. The same is true of magic and illusion. That's what filmmaking is all about."

Kelvin also took Abrams on the Universal Studios tour. Abrams was seven or eight years old. "It was this aha moment for me," he says. "I saw how movies used illusion in this grand way. They talked about technology in a way that was fascinating. The use of cameras and special effects and different techniques—it just felt like the answer to a question I didn't even know I was asking. Suddenly I realized: This is the thing I want to do."

Any given day, 23,000 scheduled flights take off and land at American airports. At any given time, 5,000 of those airplanes are simultaneously airborne. That means that approximately one million people are flying 300 mph at 30,000 feet at any given moment.

A hundred years ago, this was the stuff of science fiction. Then two brothers, Wilbur and Orville, turned science fiction into science fact. The Wright brothers' dream of flying traces back to an autumn day in 1878 when their father, a pastor and church leader, brought home a rather unique toy. Using a rubber band to twirl its rotor, a miniature bamboo helicopter flew into the air. Much like our mechanized toy helicopters, it broke after a few flights. But instead of giving up on it and going on to the next toy, the Wright brothers made their own.

And the dream of flying was conceived. A quarter century later, on December 17, 1903, Orville himself went airborne for twelve gravity-defying seconds in the first powered, piloted flight in history. It's almost impossible to imagine life as we know it without airplanes. But like every innovation, every revolution, every breakthrough, someone had to imagine the impossible first. Every dream has a genesis moment. It usually starts small—as small as a toy helicopter. But the chain reaction of faith defies gravity, defies the imagination. Without knowing it, the Wright brothers were creating the airline industry, the FAA, and the TSA. I'm sure it never crossed their minds, but their flying faith is the reason why a million people are speeding through the troposphere right now. It was two pastor's kids, Wilbur and Orville, who punched your ticket with their possibility thinking.

In 1905 Albert Einstein stunned the world with his revolutionary equation, E = mc2. Einstein wrote hundreds of papers over the course of his career. But this provocative equation, printed in one of his Annus Mirabilis papers, wasn't something he just stumbled upon by chance. It was the culmination of years of research, an insatiable curiosity about the universe, and a deep love of science.

When Einstein was a small boy, his father gave him a compass. Albert was mesmerized by the power that seemed to emanate from within the magnetic pull of the compass. He would write years later, "I can still remember … that this experience made a deep and lasting impression on me. Something deeply hidden had to be behind things." As a teenager, the intrigue and wonder of physics crept into Albert's dreams. One night, he dreamed he was sledding down a hill faster and faster, until he approached the speed of light. The stars radiated a broad spectrum of colors. He was entranced. When he awoke, he knew he had to understand the dream. In, later years he said that his entire scientific career was a meditation on that dream.

Albert Einstein didn't understand the dream he had when he was thirteen, but something deep inside him kept pondering this dream his entire life. He may not have set tangible goals for himself to shoot for, but each failed experiment, each new discovery was one step closer to understanding the speed of light. Each science class and professorship he took was moving him closer toward his destiny.

Possible Preaching Angles: (1) Dreams; Vocation; Calling—What is the dream that God has put in your heart? (2) Sanctification; Spiritual growth—God has a dream for us: to make us more like Christ? With each "failed experiment and each new discovery" we are getting one step closer to that dream and goal.

Tennessee Williams's short story "Something by Tolstoi," tells the story of Jacob Brodsky, a shy Russian Jew who runs his father's bookshop. Jacob's dream seemed complete when he married his childhood sweetheart, Lila, a beautiful, exuberant French girl. The life of a bookshop proprietor suited him fine, but not his adventurous young bride. An agent for a vaudeville touring company heard Lila sing and talked her into touring Europe with their show.

In the process of explaining to Jacob that she had to seize this opportunity and leave, she also cleft a chasm-sized hole in his heart. But before she left, he gave her a key to the bookshop and said, "You had better keep this because you will want it some day. Your love is not so much less than mine that you can get away from it. You will come back sometime, and I will be waiting.'"

Lila went on the road, and Jacob went to the back of his bookshop. To deaden the pain, he turned to his books as someone else might turn to drugs or alcohol. Weeks turned into years. When fifteen of them had passed, the bell above the bookshop's front door signaled the arrival of a customer. It was Lila.

The bookshop's owner rose to greet her. But to her astonishment, her abandoned husband didn't recognize her and simply spoke like he would to any other customer. "Do you want a book?" Stunned and trying to maintain her composure, she raised a gloved hand to her throat and stammered, "No—that is—I wanted a book, but I've forgotten the name of it." Regaining some poise, she continued, "Let me tell you the story—perhaps you have read it and can give me the name of it."

She then told him of a boy and a girl who had been constant companions since childhood. As teenagers, they fell in love, eventually married, and lived over a bookshop. She told him their whole story—the vaudeville company's offer, the husband's brokenhearted gift of the key, the return of the wife who was never able to part with the key. How, after fifteen years, she finally came to her senses and returned home to him.

Then with a desperate plea she said, "You remember it—you must remember it—the story of Lila and Jacob?" With a vacant, faraway look, he merely said, "There is something familiar about the story. I think I have read it somewhere. It seems to me that it is something by Tolstoi." Only the heartbreaking, metallic echo of the key dropping to the hard floor interrupted her horrified silence. Lila, having let go of the key as well as her hope, fled the bookshop in tears.

And Jacob returned to his books.

Possible Preaching Angles: This story could set up a sermon or sermon series on how disappointing or tragic life events crush our hopes and dreams, but the gospel can restore our hope in Christ's ultimate victory.

J.J. Watt was a defensive end and tight end for the NFL's Houston Texans (retiring in 2022). He was one of the best players in the NFL, and of course, often asked for his autograph. But the tides were turned on him when a seven-year-old sent Watt an autographed game jersey. The accompanying letter read, "I am sending you my autographed game jersey so you will know me when I am a famous NFL player." Talk about a kid who knows what he wants to be when he grows up! Watt loved it and tweeted a photo of the letter and jersey with the response "This kid has some guts … I like it."

Possible Preaching Angle:

Sometimes, we need to look to the future with earnest expectation that God's work is so sure that it's as if it's been done already—like the present day autograph of a pro footballer from the future.

There is something sad and powerful in the possibilities of a story that is never told. A recent article on the BBC highlighted the "10 Greatest Movies that Were Never Made." The list, filled with brilliant directors and powerful possible plotlines, include Napoleon by Stanley Kubrick, Kaleidoscope, a boundary-pushing Alfred Hitchcock shock film that only had an hour of test footage shot, and Heart of Darkness from Orson Welles. Powerful stories, that in capable hands would have likely become classics.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Perhaps it makes you wonder—what is the unmade movie of your life? What is the untold story that you must live into being? What would it take to put it into production?

Dave Harvey writes in “Rescuing Ambition”:

For the past couple decades, I had a condition that kept me from sleeping well. The technical term was apnea …. So I went to see the doctor. "I'll remove your uvula," he said, "then you won't snore. You'll sleep better." Now, I didn't even know I had a uvula, but I freaked when he suggested its removal …. For some reason, though, I let them do it. They cut out my uvula. And now I can sleep.

But here's something I didn't expect. When I lost my uvula, I found my dreams. You see, because I never slept well, I never dreamed. I know experts would say I dreamed and just didn't know it—but that doesn't matter because I don't ever remember dreaming. Not once. I was dreamless. That's a boring way to spend a night.

I didn't even know I'd lost my dreams until I found them—or, rather, they were returned to me. Actually, they were rescued, airlifted from some cold, lifeless crevice where dreams hibernate until the arrival of deep sleep. Or something like that.

All this may sound strange, but it's true. My dreams were rescued by a guy with a scalpel.

Lots of people live without dreams. They move from one day to the next without the refreshing effect of a memorable dream …. But there are dreams we can lose that are much more significant than those I was losing. Not the REM kind of dreams, but the dreams that drive us when we're awake. The dreams that cause us to reach beyond ourselves, to see beyond the present and to live for something more. If you're having trouble holding on to those types of dreams, that's a real problem.