God’s Dream

In our Lenten series, we talked about God’s dream as a string we held onto when we couldn’t see where we were going, when we were too tired to keep working or keep walking, or when we were too afraid of everything around us. We roleplayed a lot of these scenarios to recreate different moments in Exodus, holding on to a literal thread each week as we moved through the hallways of fake frogs and locusts flying. The thread itself was a poem—holding us together as we held on, letting it guide us despite and because of everything.

And so, when asked to write down what we imagined God’s dream was for ourselves, I wanted to recreate that thread in the responses to show the poem itself. How beautiful to have thirty individual responses, each its own flat surface of a diamond collectively reflecting a piece of God back to all of us.

My daughters helped me with this project. Sitting at our kitchen table, we typed up each response and then began to look for words that jumped out at us. We would cross out repeated words as certain words in each line began speaking to another. We kept combing through each line until it felt like there was a whole message being said. With no word added and no line unused, this collective poem turned into a beautiful meditation on the dreams that are ours for the taking.