Someone reminded me that I have promised a "blog tomorrow" for sometime now. Like the neon sign in the window of the local bar promising "Free Beer Tomorrow", tomorrow seems to either never come or you realize that you are living in the tomorrow you still thought you had.Today I am feeling like the latter. I am living in the tomorrow that I thought would perpetually be there. A date on a calendar months away, a promise made for something you never think will happen, an amorphous project without a deadline; there is always another day. Until there isn't. Worse yet, when you realize that your far off dreams of what was possible have slipped past you, and are now old-hat. Like a parent wishing that they could see and talk to their child living overseas whenever they wanted but isn't aware of Skype, or video chatting, let alone web-cams. The futuristic "video conferencing" of decades ago is what he or she thinks of when he or she dreams of seeing a grandchild or talking to their son or daughter. Locked into the dream, they miss the reality. Subservient, captive to the "dream" of decades ago, so often we fail to see the truth of today because we have spent too much time dreaming of "what it should look like when it gets here" and not what it really does. If you were waiting for the 1960's dream of video conferencing, you would miss the 2010 reality.
A trip to Best Buy and $50 solves the video conference problem. What seemed far-fetched at one point is now accomplished in an afternoon. Tomorrow is today, and tomorrow will quickly be yesterday if we do not continually renew our dreams of what is possible. I will give you an example. I have a good friend who lives in the Cayman Islands. We both have BlackBerry Smartphones and will frequently send messages back to each other via a program called BlackBerry Messenger. For the first couple of months after I got my BlackBerry, I was amazed that I could be "chatting" with my friend instantly from across oceans. It was cool, but I got over it. If I stayed impressed, convinced that chatting with folks in other nations would be the apex of what I thought to be possible, then I would quickly be left in a cloud of innovative dust.
This is a personal lesson we can learn from the world of technology. We must never believe our dreams are too big. Like the dream of a video conference "machine" in your own home, the danger of seeing an idea as too big, too complicated to ever happen will always result in you being asleep too long and unaware when the tomorrows of the past become the yesterdays of the future.
How this applies to your life, the church, etc? I will leave that up to you.
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