Years ago, more than fifty to be precise, I read a book by Elisabeth Elliot called, “Through Gates of Splendor” in which she recounts the excitement and heartache of serving God in a very foreign place. She and her husband Jim traveled to Ecuador to work with the Auca Indians, a risk which proved to be the end of Jim’s and four other missionary men’s lives, widowing their partners!

Risk at God’s instruction is not nearly as scary as risk taken with our own choices. God’s grace is to also lead us back from egregious trails, so that we will see what we did to get where we arrive, and to help us see the path back to His will. He gives us dreams and has for 6000 years! His plan is a dream which often begins in little children, not ending until we draw our last breaths!

No two people have the same dreams, not one of us is like another in our journey. Yet, God allows each person to stretch and contract in our own way. Since it is God who first wired us, no one person has any Biblical mandate to write off or stand in critique of what God calls us to, nor the unique way He instructs each person to follow Him.

My family traveled to South America, for our belief, faith and hope were in the God of 106 Bibleless tribes in Peru! While my dad designed communications systems for Wycliffe, he also humbly repaired two way radios for missionaries like the Elliots who landed on sand bars to bring that same hope to fear driven indians in villages thousands of miles from comfortable living rooms and baseball games in Kansas! As I dreamed of jungles where we'd serve, so too had Jim Elliot and lost his life bring hope and faith to the Waorani tribe in Ecuador! His story drove the pursuit of our family to Peru!

Through that same hope, my belief took my fledging life from a sand bar just a few miles from the Amazon, to a brick building in Texas, where hundreds of other dream driven people proclaim that same faith and hope for the fear filled people of Iran, satellite dishes of Papua New Guinea, and even the palace of the king in Saudi Arabia.

Lord, bring us dreams, bring them to our children, our neighbors, and our communities. Let our faith and hope be a beacon for lost people in our own towns.