As If We Were Dreaming

Dreams play an important role in the biblical narrative. It is often through dreams that God speaks to God’s beloved. Sometimes it is a promise. Sometimes it is a warning. Always it is a reminder that we are not alone; God sees us and is with us. There is a passage in the Psalms where God’s exiled people were all but without hope, wondering if God had forgotten them. But God restored their hope and brought them back home. The only way they could describe their experience was that it was “as if we were dreaming.” ^[1]

When God restores our hope and brings us back to ourselves (physically, spiritually, metaphorically) it can seem as if it is a dream; a dream come true. The thought of bringing young people together in this post pandemic, complex, and sometimes frightening world feels “as if we are dreaming.” “We can only imagine that following the isolation of the past few years, the experience of joining with thousands of young people from across the country and world will be rather unreal and dream-like for young people (and adults!) at the 2025 Presbyterian Youth Triennium.” Hence the theme As If We Were Dreaming.

Our faith challenges us to dream; to pay attention to the dreams that the Spirit implants in our hearts and minds. As the conference unfolds, we will explore this exciting concept with the help of a number of biblical narratives. When we gather on the first day of the Triennium, we will consider how we were Born to Dream. Using the text of Acts 2 and the story of Pentecost we will remember how the church was born with the promise that God’s Spirit will be poured out on all flesh and the young will have visions and the old will dream dreams. Amid the excitement, chaos, and cacophony of Pentecost the beloved community was born to dream! Amid the excitement, chaos and cacophony of thousands of young people coming together after a six year hiatus, it is time for us to dream again!

But our dreaming is not in isolation. It is embraced and inspired by God. The story of Jacob running from his problems in the book of Genesis offers this intimate story of him trying to sleep the night before a major confrontation. He dreams. He dreams of a stairway, a ladder between heaven and earth. When he wakes, he proclaims that while he thought he was all alone, the place that God had brought him was none other than the house of God. Even when we, like Jacob, may feel alone we are not alone. Our dreams are held in the context of God’s embrace and the shared community of faith. Our sub theme for the second day of the conference is Collective Dreaming.

Our dreams, however, are not all sunshine and roses. Sometimes our dreams are nightmares, warnings, or perhaps offer a moral parable. On such occasions God calls us to Face the Nightmares. The Joseph narratives in Genesis remind us that those who dream such dreams are sometimes rejected, yet God uses them and their dreams for good. Even in times of hardship (even betrayal) we remember that God is still at work. Even Jesus on the night in which he was betrayed took bread and cup and dreamed of a new covenant.

Once we have experienced God’s sacred dreams, we are never the same. Like the Magi who were told in a dream to go home by another way, we must find a new way forward. Or as the prophet Isaiah proclaimed, “You shall go out with joy…” We conclude our Triennium experience affirming that it is not to end our dreaming. Instead, we are to Wake Up and Dream. We are challenged and commissioned to imagine new ways of manifesting the gospel of Christ in our own contexts, having experienced God’s presence and power together.

We invite you to join us as we worship, learn, fellowship, and play as a hopeful and joyful community of faith at the 2025 Presbyterian Youth Triennium. The experience will be one of those life-shaping faith forming events that you will never forget! It will be As If We Were Dreaming.