Thy will be done
on
earth as it is in heaven.
Once,
having been asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God would
come, Jesus replied, “The kingdom of God does not come with your
careful observation, nor will people say, ‘Here it is,’ or ‘There
it is,’ because the kingdom of God is within you” (Luke 17:20-21
NIV).
An
essential ingredient of impossible dreams is that we deny their
impossibility. Thus, driven by the unattainable we achieve the
attainable. An important distinction to make is between significance
and scope. That is, each individual act in a real sense actualizes
the ultimate dream since it provides immediate psychological
reinforcement through participation in the meaning of the dream. For
example, my intent is to get to a vacation cabin in the Great Smoky
Mountains. This is many miles from my house, but my act of leaving
the garage is pleasurable since it is a necessary constituent of my
dream vacation. The journey (often bringing the family together)
matters as much or more to my mental pleasure receptors than the
moment I actually turn in the driveway to the cabin. My journey,
though it will take many hours, is pleasurable because all the while
it is massaging and actualizing my dream now – not just some future
time.
In
fact it is almost a given that our dreams which accentuate the
positive are more pleasurable than their attainment – which always
also entails the negative. This powerful phenomenon is so basic to
every aspect of life that its application is well-nigh universal.
Surely it has played a fundamental role in the survival of our
species.
We
do well to elaborate the implications of our dreams in their
immediacy and not just in some gauzy future. The hollow attainment
of success has become a cultural archetype – as in the man who
desires to provide abundance for his family and is always at work and
never at home to intimately nurture his children during irreplaceable
years. The first step to getting our priorities straight is to ask
how remote dreams play out in the present so that we do not end up with
tragic, Pyrrhic victories. Do our ends ring eternally true when put
to the test daily in the temporal world? The ultimate test of any
far off dream is its impact when embedded beneath the skin.
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