Visions & Dreams

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.

In Raymond Arsenault’s biography of John Lewis, he recounts Lewis’s mentors and their shared vision of “the Beloved Community.” Howard Thurman, Martin Luther King Jr., and John Lewis often spoke of “the Beloved Community,” which was “a philosophical theory and a call to service.”

At the successful conclusion of the yearlong boycott in December 1956, King quoted the Book of Matthew and urged the boycotters to “inject a new dimension of love into the veins of our civilization.” “Love your enemies,” he recited, “bless them that curse you, pray for them who despitefully use you, that you may be the children of your Father which is in Heaven.” “We must remember,” King continued, “… that a boycott is not an end within itself; it is merely a means to awaken a sense of shame within the oppressor and challenge his false sense of superiority. But the end is reconciliation; the end is redemption; the end is the creation of the beloved community.”

Placing the goals of nonviolent direct action on such a high moral plane could be inspiring, drawing Lewis and many people of faith into the movement. But as the historian Mills Thornton has noted, King’s frequent allusions to the “beloved community” as a reachable promised land sometimes had the opposite effect, prompting more practical listeners to “dismiss it as a pipe dream.”

Dilli Lumjel gave his life to Jesus on May 4, 2011, at 1:33 a.m. Earlier that day, he had performed a Hindu funeral service for his father-in-law in a refugee camp in eastern Nepal, where he lived with more than 12,000 other refugees.

As was the custom, Lumjel spent the night at his wife’s uncle’s house. Both of Lumjel’s parents-in-law had recently converted to Christianity. That night he had a vision: His mother-in-law approached him and shared the gospel, stating, “If you enter this house, you have to believe in Jesus.” Then he saw a flash of lightning from heaven and heard a voice saying, “What you are hearing is true; you have to believe.” In the dream, he knelt down crying and committed his life to Jesus.

When he woke up, his face was wet with tears. Lumjel called a local pastor and told him he had had a dream and was now a Christian. The news shocked his family of devout Hindus. He said, “Every­body—my relatives, my wife, sisters—they all woke up asking, ‘What happened to Dilli? Is he mental? He says he’s a Christian!’”

The next day, the pastor explained the gospel to Lumjel and his wife. The two committed their lives to Jesus. A day later, Lumjel began attending a monthlong Bible school in the refugee camp. Then church leaders sent Lumjel out to preach the gospel to other refugees. Several months later, he became a church deacon, then an elder.

One year later, Lumjel arrived in Columbus, Ohio, as part of a massive resettlement of about 96,000 ethnic Nepalis expelled from their home of Bhutan to the United States. There he joined Yusuf Kadariya in pastoring a group of about 35 Bhutanese Nepali families. As more Bhutanese Nepali refugees settled in Columbus and the group brought more people to Christ, the church continued to grow.

Today, Lumjel is a full-time pastor at Emmanuel Fellowship Church in Columbus. On a wintry Sunday morning in December, about 200 people streamed into the sanctuary, greeting one another with a slight bow and “Jai Masih,” meaning “Victory to Christ.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

God is bringing the nations to our neighborhoods here in America and is bringing many to faith in Christ. We can carry out the Great Commission in part by welcoming them with Christian love and sharing the gospel to those with hungry hearts.

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.

Casey Diaz was a gang member as a teenager in South-Central Los Angeles. As a leader in the Rockwood Street Locos, he led his gang in home invasions, robbing convenience stores, and stabbing rival gang members.

He was eventually caught by LAPD and sentenced to nearly 13 years for second-degree murder. When he was transferred to New Folsom State Prison the guard said to him, “Listen closely, Diaz. We know that you’re a shot caller (a prison power-broker), so we’re putting you in solitary.” He was cooped up in an eight-by-ten-foot windowless box, with all his meals slipped in through a slot in the steel door.

The only source of illumination in his cell was a heavy Plexiglas light that couldn’t be turned off, which made it difficult to get any sleep. There was nothing to do—no TV, no radio, no books. He had been told by other prisoners that if a person is not strong-willed, then solitary confinement could absolutely break him.

He writes:

After about a year at New Folsom, as I was lying on my bed, I heard an older woman say, “Is there someone in that cell?” The guard said “Yes, ma’am, but you’re wasting your time.” She answered, “Well, Jesus came for him, too.”

She approached the cell: “How are you doing?” “I couldn’t be better,” was my sarcastic reply. She said “Young man, I’m going to pray for you. But there’s something else I want to tell you: Jesus is going to use you.”

A year later, he was lying down in his cell, daydreaming. When he looked at the wall, something strange was happening. A movie was playing, it was the crucifixion of Christ which he saw enacted in vivid detail.

He then writes:

What got to me most was when this man on the cross looked at me and said, “Darwin, I’m doing this for you.” I shuddered. Apart from the guards and my family, no one knew my real name. Everyone called me Casey. Then I heard the sound of breath leaving him. At that moment, I knew he had died.

That’s when I hit the floor in the middle of the cell. I started weeping because I knew, somehow, that this was Almighty God. I started confessing my sins: “God, I’m sorry for stabbing so many people. God, I’m sorry I robbed so many families.” With each new confession, I felt another weight come off my shoulders.

That was the start of my journey of faith. I was no longer a shot caller. I had found a new calling: telling other inmates about Jesus.

Editor’s Note: Casey Diaz lives in Los Angeles, where he serves as a part-time pastor.

Pastor and author Craig Brian Larson writes:

In January, 2021, as the coronavirus continued to spread, we received concerning news from a family in our church. Jose Alvarado, his wife, Sayra, their son Antonio, and his mother Martha had all caught the virus.

While other family members were largely over it, Jose continued to get worse and he was admitted to the hospital. His symptoms included a fever over 104, uncontrollable coughing, and developing pneumonia. The oxygen level in his blood was dropping quickly, and doctors moved Jose to the intensive care unit the next day.

After a couple of days in ICU, his fever finally broke, but the fluid in his lungs persisted, along with coughing and weakness. Jose continued to fight and do various exercises, and this led to continued improvement over time. After 10 days in ICU, around 3 a.m., Jose saw four angels standing around his bed, two on a side. It was dream-like. He did not see their faces. He had been lying on his chest to drain the liquid from his lungs, but the angels helped him turn over to his back to breathe more easily, and he instantly felt healing.

The angels left, and the nurse came around 5 a.m. to draw blood for daily tests. Jose asked her what happened overnight, why there were so many people in the room. She said no one had been in the room until she came in, and even so only one person is allowed at a time due to COVID protocols. (Hospital rules do not apply to angels!)

After breakfast, the nurse told Jose they were moving him out of ICU to a regular room, since he was doing better. A few days later, the doctor surveyed Jose’s test results and oxygen reading and said, “You’re going home today.” That afternoon he was home with his family eating a delicious meal. Although Jose continued to useoxygen for a few days as he recovered at home, the turnaround in his symptoms was dramatic once the angels intervened.

Douglas Murray is a prolific humanist writer and social critic who has authored two bestselling books. He finds himself in the odd position of being a self-professed non-believer who nevertheless has great respect for Christianity and the positive role it has played in building Western civilization--to the point of calling himself a “Christian atheist.”

On an episode of the Unbelievable podcast, Murray was asked, “Why don’t you just believe in God?” His response has always been that he genuinely finds it difficult to accept certain aspects of the Christian argument. Belief in God, he noted, cannot be faked or forced.

Esther O’Reilly, also a guest on the program, noted that if men are rational animals, then God must deal with them as such. Therefore, there can be evidence that fully satisfies man’s search for these truths, both intellectually and spiritually, as opposed to requiring a blind leap of faith. The historical reliability of the New Testament, for instance, is one such piece of evidence, since it attests to the truth of Christ’s life, death, and resurrection. This evidence is available to all who wish to judge it, point by point.

The host of the program, Justin Brierley, asked Murray what it would take for him to make a return to faith in God and Christianity. Murray said “I think I’d need to hear a voice.” Brierley asked “Literally a voice from beyond?” “Oh yes,” he replied, “I mean it literally.”

He admitted to being fascinated by the lack of such experiences in the West when compared to places like the Middle East or Africa. He also cited the utter incredulity with which Christians in the West treat individuals who claim to have had such experiences. He said, “this has historically been one of the ways in which religion has thrived, in visions.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

God has given us evidence for belief in him through creation (Psa. 19:1-6; Rom 1:4), through fulfilled prophecy (Isa. 7:14; Micah 5:2), and through the resurrection of Christ (John 20:1-9; Rom. 1:4) to name a few. But there are many who simply choose not to believe.

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.”

Scott McKnight writes in “The Hum of Angels”:

I was visiting a bird-supplies store when I mentioned to the owner that my wife and I had owned a hummingbird feeder but had never once seen a hummer at the feeder, so we tossed it out. I concluded that there were no hummers near our home.

The shop owner asked where we lived, I told him, and then he said, "They are there. Not only do some of your neighbors have hummers on their feeders, but hummers are all over the village." What he said next was the take-home line: "You just have to have eyes to see them. Once you do, you will see them everywhere. They are small and fast and camouflaged, but they are not that hard to spot."

Eventually we bought a new feeder, filled it, and waited until our eyes got accustomed to the sight of hummers. We now see them everywhere. When other people go on a walk with us, we often observe a hummer—but it is rare that our friends spot one. It takes experience. You need to learn to spot them out of the side of your eyes and acclimate to their habits of zooming and darting and taking shelter on obscure branches and even on telephone lines. But once you've learned to spot a hummer you will see them everywhere because they are everywhere.

Like angels. They, too, are all around us. Few of us have seen one because we first have to learn what we are looking for. In a good book about angels, Martin Israel, quoting a friend, wrote this: "Eternity lies all round us and only a veil prevents us seeing it." The hum of angels surrounds us, and we only need ears to hear it or eyes to see them. Or perhaps a special sense for them. After all, the Bible tells us that Balaam's donkey could see an angel that Balaam himself could not see.

The newest addition to the grand list of Coolest Things Ever was first unveiled in New York City in 2013: the Lego X-Wing, the largest Lego model ever built. The model of the classic Star Wars fighter has a wingspan of 44 feet and comes complete with R2-D2 and a full range of sound effects. It's a super-duper-sized version of Star Wars Lego starfighter set #9493 and was made with 5,335,200 Lego bricks. That, according to Lego, makes it the largest model ever built, eclipsing the Lego robot at the Mall of America by some 2 million bricks.

The X-Wing was built at the Lego Model Shop at the company's facility in Kladno, Czech Republic. It took 32 "master builders" and 17,336 man-hours to construct the X-Wing. Plans for the model were created using Lego's proprietary 3-D design software, and the construction team had to work with a team of structural engineers to ensure that the model was safe, master builder Erik Varszegi told Wired magazine. Once completed, the model—which weighs 45,980 pounds—was eventually shipped to Legoland California.

Editor’s Note: This Lego model still holds the record in 2024

Possible Preaching Angles: True leadership and community requires lots of vision (the design stage) and then teamwork and unity (the construction stage).

A guy goes ice fishing for the very first time. All of a sudden, he hears a voice. "There are no fish under the ice!" He ignores it and moves to another area, cuts a hole, and tosses his line in. Again, he hears the booming voice: "There are no fish under the ice!" He nervously looks up and asks, "Lord? Is that you?"

"No, this is the rink manager!"

—Actress Allison Janney

In an issue of Christianity Today, a Muslim man describes his commitment to follow Isa al Masih, Jesus the Messiah. Suprisingly, a rather "ordinary" miracle caused this man to open his heart to Jesus. Here's how he described the miracle:

One night the only food my wife and I had was a small portion of macaroni. My wife prepared it very nicely. Then one of her friends knocked on the door. I told myself, The macaroni is not sufficient for even the two of us, so how will it be enough for three of us? But because we have no other custom, we opened the door, and she came in to eat with us.

While we were eating, the macaroni started to multiply; it became full in the bowl. I suspected that something was wrong with my eyes, so I started rubbing them. I thought maybe my wife hid some macaroni under the small table, so I checked, but there was nothing. My wife and I looked at each other, but because the guest was there we said nothing.

Afterward I lay down on the bed, and as I slept, Isa came to me and asked me, "Do you know who multiplied the macaroni?" I said, "I don't know." He said, "I am Isa al Masih [Jesus, the Messiah]. If you follow me, not only the macaroni but your life will be multiplied."

Dr. Tanya Marie Luhrman, a psychological anthropologist at Stanford University, retells an old joke: When you talk to God, we call it prayer, but when God talks to you, we call it schizophrenia.

But in her special report for CNN, Dr. Luhrmann offers a surprisingly supportive scientific analysis of evangelical Christians who claim that they have heard God speak to them. She concludes by stating, "Science cannot tell us whether God generated the voice that Abraham or Augustine heard. But it can tell us that many of these events are normal, part of the fabric of human perception." There you have it: If you hear God speak to you, you might not be crazy after all.

Dr. Luhrmann concludes with a powerful example of hearing Jesus speak: "When the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. sat at his kitchen table, in the winter of 1956, terrified by the fear of what might happen to him and his family during the Montgomery bus boycott, he said he heard the voice of Jesus promising, 'I will be with you.' He went forward."

His Italian mother named him after the gospel writer Mark in the hopes that he too would tell the gospel truth. But 13th Century Europeans found it impossible to believe Mark's tales of faraway lands. He claimed that, when he was only seventeen, he took an epic journey lasting a quarter of a century, taking him across the steppes of Russia, the rugged mountains of Afghanistan, the wastelands of Persia, and over the top of the world through the Himalayas. He was the first European to enter China. Through an amazing set of circumstances, he became a favorite of the most powerful ruler on planet earth, the Kublai Khan. Mark saw cities that made European capitals look like roadside villages. The Khan's palace dwarfed the largest castles and cathedrals in Europe. It was so massive that its banquet room alone could seat 6,000 diners at one time, each eating on a plate of pure gold.

Mark saw the world's first paper money and marveled at the explosive power of gunpowder. It would be the 18th Century before Europe would manufacture as much steel as China was producing in the year 1267. He became the first Italian to taste that Chinese culinary invention, pasta. As an officer of the Khan's court, he travelled to places no European would see for another 500 years.

After serving Kublai Khan for 17 years, Mark began his journey home to Venice, loaded down with gold, silk, and spices. When he arrived home, people dismissed his stories of a mythical place called China. His family priest rebuked him for spinning lies. At his deathbed, his family, friends, and priest begged him to recant his tales of China. But setting his jaw and gasping for breath, Mark spoke his final words, "I have not even told you half of what I saw."

Though 13th Century Europeans rejected his stories as the tales of a liar or lunatic, history has proven the truthfulness behind the book he wrote about his adventures—The Travels of Marco Polo. 1300 years before Marco Polo wrote about China, another man, the Apostle John, went on an amazing journey to heaven itself. At times we jaded postmoderns shake our heads in disbelief at the Apostle John's vision and other biblical witnesses to the glory of heaven. But the biblical writers who describe heaven would declare to us, "I have not even told you half of what I saw. Heaven is more joyful, more glorious, and more beautiful than you could ever imagine." May their God-inspired testimonies and descriptions move us to long for God's gift to us in Christ—the glory of heaven.

Most people know about the passion of Martin Luther King Jr. for racial justice and nonviolent resistance. However, some people aren't as familiar with King's deep personal faith in Christ. In his book Welcoming Justice, Charles Marsh describes one of King's profound encounters with the Risen Christ.

[In January 1956, Martin Luther King Jr.] returned home around midnight after a long day of organizational meetings. His wife and young daughter were already in bed, and King was eager to join them. But a threatening call—the kind of call he was getting as many as 30 to 40 times a day—interrupted his attempt to get some much-needed rest. When he tried to go back to bed, he could not shake the menacing voice that kept repeating the hateful words in his head.

King got up, made a pot of coffee, and sat down at his kitchen table. With his head buried in his hands, he cried out to God. There in his kitchen in the middle of the night, when he had come to the end of strength, King met the living Christ in an experience that would carry him through the remainder of his life. "I heard the voice of Jesus saying still to fight on," King later recalled. "He promised never to leave me, never to leave me alone … He promised never to leave me, no never alone."

In the stillness of the Alabama night, the voice of Jesus proved more convincing than the threatening voice of the anonymous caller. The voice of Jesus gave him the courage to press through the tumultuous year of 1956 to the victorious end of the Montgomery Bus Boycott. More than that, it gave him a vision for ministry that would drive him for the rest of his life.

Port Authority Police Department officers Will Jimeno and John McLoughlin were the last two people rescued from the World Trade Center following the September 11th terrorist attack. Oliver Stone told their story in his 2006 movie titled World Trade Center.

For Will Jimeno, however, that tragic day represents a defining moment in his Christian faith. Along with McLoughlin and three other officers, Jimeno entered Tower 1 on a mission to rescue as many civilians as possible. But almost as soon as they got inside, the building collapsed. McLoughlin and Jimeno were pinned under large blocks of concrete rubble and twisted steel. The other three officers were killed instantly.

For the next 10 hours, Jimeno and his partner fought through pain and thirst inside a cramped concrete tomb swirling with dust and smoke. At times, ruptured gas lines would send fireballs hurtling into the collapsed ruins, threatening to burn the two men to death. In another terrifying moment, heat from the fireballs "cooked off" the ammunition inside the firearm of a fallen officer, sending 15 bullets ricocheting around the chamber.

At that point, Jimeno's hope began to falter. "We had been crushed, burnt, and shot at by then," he said. "I was exhausted. I had done everything as a police officer that I could do, and everything as a human being. I was at that point where I just knew I was going to die."

Yet when things began to seem unbearable, Jimeno saw a figure coming toward him through the rubble. "He wore a glowing white robe and a rope belt," he said. "I couldn't see his face, but I knew it was Jesus." Jimeno saw an endless sea of waving grass over the figure's left shoulder and a lake over the right. He says, "I remember asking Jesus, 'If I get to heaven, can I have some water?'"

According to Jimeno, the vision filled him with a new volley of hope. "I had this resurgence of optimism, this resurgence of the will to fight," he said. Turning toward McLoughlin, he yelled, "We're going to get out of this hellhole!" And they did. Several hours later, U.S. Marines and NYPD rescue workers lifted him out of his temporary prison, and Jimeno thanked God.

The events of that day have given him a new perspective on the brevity of life. He noted that, even if a person lives to be 90-years-old, that's only a little over 32,000 days. "It's not that many," Jimeno said. "You have to do good and do right with the small period you have in between."

Roc Bottomly writes in Discipleship Journal:

One night in a dream, my wife saw the mangled body of one of our children. She frantically tried to help, but nothing worked. She was helpless, desperate, and terrified. After waking, she agonized through the morning about her dream. Finally, she called me at the office and asked, "Roc, do you think this is God telling us to prepare for the death of our child?"

I listened and reasoned a bit. After all, the Bible gives examples of God telling people they are going to die. Then I thought about the nature of the dream (gruesome carnage and helpless despair) and the impact of the dream (fear and grief). I told Bev I was confident that this was not God speaking. It's not like Him to frighten us for no reason. This sounded more like a message from her heart, which wrestled regularly with fears of losing a child, or a message from Satan, who is well known for lies and terror. Years have passed, and none of our children has died in a gruesome manner.

A similar "message," on the other hand, had a very different feel. While on vacation, my daughter Bethany was speeding down a California freeway with three teenage friends. One of them, Jody, told of having dreamed the night before that they were in a serious wreck and that she had been the only one with a seat belt on and the only survivor. Hearing that, they all fastened their seat belts.

Later that day, their car swerved into the grass median and rolled. The investigating officer looked at the car and the shaken but unhurt teens and said, "If you hadn't had your seat belts on, the outcome would have been a lot different."

Where did Jody's dream come from? Consider the message: a warning of a danger that turned out to be very real. Consider the tone: an urging to do something that was right and reasonable, something that traveling teens often neglect. Consider the effect: saved lives. Who speaks in this way? A Father.