Jim Morris made his major league debut on the mound for the Tampa Bay Devil Rays on September 18, 1999 against the Texas Rangers. Just another rookie that made it to the show? Well yes and no. Jim Morris was thirty-five years old at the time.

His journey to "the bigs" began in 1983 when the Brewers picked him in the first round of the draft, but he never made it out of their farm system. One injury after another dashed his hopes of ever throwing his fast ball sixty feet six inches away from major league hitters in a big league park. He went on with life and became a high school baseball coach.

After a rather grueling work-out with his team, he gave them a pep talk, encouraging them to go after their dreams and be the best they can be. One of his pitchers said, "What about you, Coach? What about your dreams?"

He was referring to Morris' dreams to make it to the big leagues. They had him cornered. He was asking them to go after their dreams, while ignoring his own. "OK," he said, "if you make it to the playoffs this year, I'll try out for a major league team."

Morris pitched in sixteen games in the 2000 season with a 0-0 Won/loss record. The Devil Rays sent him down to their AAA affiliate, the Durham Bulls on May 13, 2000 where he made only one appearance. His career was undistinguished, but he isn't. He is a man who followed his dreams and helped a new generation pursue theirs.

—Guidepost, May, 2000, p. 3-6., The Sporting News: Baseball-Jim Morris web site Illustration by Jim L. Wilson

OK, pick a number, any number. Write it down on your bulletin. Now turn to your neighbor and show them what you wrote down. How many of you wrote down a number larger than a million?

In 1998, Larry Page and Sergey Brin incorporated Google while still graduate students at Stanford University. According to Fortune Small Business Magazine, Internet users perform over 150 million searches a day on the Google Search Engine. The Google Search Engine can access over two billion pages in 74 different languages. One study recently showed that Google users used the search engine 13 million hours in one month. Compare that with Yahoo that came in second with 5.4 million hours.

How did they get so big? I don’t have the expertise to answer that question, but I can tell you that it began with their initial vision. The word Google comes from a mathematical term that is the number 1 followed by 100 zeroes.

While most people are likely to pick a number like 14 or 98, Brin & Page decided to pick a googol—1 with 100 zeroes. Jim Reese, chief operations engineer of Google says this about the company’s founders: “It takes a lot of confidence and courage to go ahead and do that [be huge]. It’s rare to find people who think on such a grand scale and are also able to create a great product at the same time.”

—Fortune Small Business Magazine, September 2002, p 25-29 Illustration by Jim L. Wilson

Proverbs 29:18 NASB “Where there is no vision, the people are unrestrained, But happy is he who keeps the law.”

While Yoav Rosen was growing up in Jerusalem he was obsessed with the act of walking on water. Last month Rosen received a patent for a device he says will allow ordinary people to do just that. Inventors such as Leonardi Di Vinci dreamed of such a device. Over 100 water-walking inventions have been patented in America over the past 150 years, but none of them actually work.

When Rosen moved to the United States from Israel three years ago, he was not able to find a comparable job and decided it was time to follow his dream. While many inventors have too many ideas to pursue, Rosen says a device to walk on water has been his only dream since the age of 11.

Rosen's design resembles a design dating from 1858. His pontoons are made of plywood and styrofoam and are tethered together to keep the user's legs from spreading apart while walking. He added a newly designed flap that allows a person to using his device while walking at a normal gait.

Rosen has tested six generations of prototypes and says this new device in counterintuitive.

He says, "This is why this design has eluded hundreds of inventors." In regards to fulfilling his dream, Rosen says, "Before you start walking on water you have to stand on water, and that's not an easy thing. The water is a living, moving, dynamic thing."

—The New York Times, Inventing a Way to Walk on Water, by Teresa Riordan, August 2, 2004, Submitted Jim Sandell.

Mr. Rosen never let his dream die. His example should inspire us to pursue the calling God has for us.

Col. 4:17 (NASB) "And say to Archippus, 'Take heed to the ministry which you have received in the Lord, that you may fulfill it.'"

In Bangladesh, it is as natural for Muslim men to talk about their dreams to pass the time of day as it is for American men to talk about the Pennant Race, a football game or how their golf swing is doing. They don't interpret dreams as "wish fulfillments," as Freud did, but they do believe that they have meaning. Our missionaries are reporting that many Muslims are finding faith in Christ through their dreams. A missionary to Bangladesh said, “The most common dream, is of two people standing beside one another. One is Mohammad, the other Jesus. Mohammad is pointing to Jesus and saying, ‘Not me, follow Him.’”

One conversion the missionary had firsthand knowledge of happened after he made a decision to take a break from spreading the gospel among the roads to explore more remote regions of the country. A volunteer from First Baptist Church in Portland, Oregon, with a local translator, paddled a boat down the river to distribute Bibles. They paddled up to a man who was bathing and handed him a Bible. The man thanked them, and said, "I just had a dream two days ago that Allah would put truth in my hand. I believe that this is the truth that Allah spoke of." According to the missionary, they haven't been able to follow-up on the man, but in the region that he lives, there is a report of about 75 baptisms and he believes that this man has taken the gospel back to his people like the Ethiopian Eunuch did to his.

DREAMS/ISLAM/CONVERSION

Thousands of Muslims around the world are coming to faith in Christ, some of them through their dreams. The Koran mentions Jesus and gives enough information to pique a Muslim's attention about Christ. Chapter 3:42-55 of the Koran is almost identical to Luke chapter 2. It mentions the Virgin Birth, that Jesus was righteous, and that He performed miracles—including raising the dead to life. At the end of the passage it says that God says to Jesus, "you will come to me and I will lift your followers above all people of the world." A missionary to Bangladesh said, "It doesn't lift Jesus up to Savior status, but it does lift him above prophet status." It provides enough information to give their dreams context.

The missionary is reporting about a dream that led a Muslim Man to find Christ. In his dream, he saw a big crowd of people that were trying to get to a man in the middle of the crowd who had a veil over his face. He began to make his way through the crowd to touch the man, and he was able to get close enough to see him, but before he could touch him, he woke up. He couldn't believe it. He thought that the man was Jesus, but he wanted confirmation. So he spent the next three years wondering if the man in the dream was really Jesus.

On a business trip he walked into a Catholic Church and saw a painting of Jesus—it had the same face as the man in his dream. He had his answer. But his journey wasn't over, now he needed to find someone who could tell him about Jesus, the man in his dream. It is not against the law to preach the gospel in Bangladesh, but it is discouraged and the authorities will throw those who proselyte people to Christianity in jail. So he couldn't casually thumb through the yellow pages and pick out a church. But by the providence of God, he found one of the eight nationals who work with our missionary as evangelists. The evangelist led him to faith in Jesus. This time, it wasn't the man trying to touch Jesus, but Jesus reached out his nail-scarred hand and touched him and set him free from the bondage of his sin and saved his soul.

Psalm 98:2 NASB “The Lord has made known His salvation; He has revealed His righteousness in the sight of the nations.”

500 years ago, Leonardo Da Vinci dreamed of creating a giant bat-like device that used the arms and legs of the pilot to make the craft fly. A team of Canadian engineering students have found a way to bring that dream to life. International Aviation officials are expected to certify that the craft known as the “Snowbird” has made the world’s first successful, sustained flight of a human-powered ornithopter, according to the University of Toronto. The aircraft weighs 94 pounds, and has a wingspan of 105 feet, which is roughly as big as a Boeing 737 airliner.

The ornithopter’s flight lasting 19.3 seconds and covered 475 feet at an average speed of 16 mph. The aircraft is so lightweight it had to be towed to takeoff because it was too light to carry the equipment it needed to get off the ground by itself. The team said others have claimed to have built machines that flew like a bird, but those claims were never verified so they believed they were the first. Da Vinci is not believed to have built the machine, and engineers don’t think it would have worked if he had tried. Project manager and pilot Todd Reichert said, “This represents one of the last of the aviation firsts.”

--Ornithopter achieves Da Vinci’s dream?, http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20100924/od_nm/us_ornithopter_odd; September 24, 2010. Illustration by Jim L. Wilson and Jim Sandell.

Philippians 4:13 (GW) “I can do everything through Christ who strengthens me.”

The creator of Veggie Tales, Phil Vischer, recently told a crowd of Christian journalists the Lord used bankruptcy to humble him to pursue God rather than a dream. At the Evangelical Press Association’s opening banquet, Vischer explained that he found himself facing a God he had never heard about in Sunday School. “A God that apparently wanted me to let go of my dreams” he said. Vischer described how at the height of his professional success, everything went wrong. His staff members started arguing and sales dropped. He said he had to fire half his staff and was sued by a former distributor. Eventually, the court ruled in favor of the distributor and Vischer lost everything, and filed bankruptcy.

Vischer said a cassette tape of a sermon influenced his thinking. He saw how going through testing can help put a person’s priorities straight. He said God tested Abraham when he asked him to kill his dream and the promise of God, Isaac. Vischer said, “You can image how much Abraham loves Isaac. He was not only the son, but he is the promise, he is the dream, he is how God is going to sue him to change the world. He is everything.” Vischer shared that if God gives a person a dream, breathes life into it and then it dies. He might want to know what is more important to that person, the dream of God. He added, “And what God learned about Abraham that day is that Abraham would let go of everything before he would let go of God. God said,

Veggie Tales Creator: Bankruptcy Humbled Me, Killed My Idol, http://www.christianpost.com/news/veggietales-creator-bankruptcy-humbled-me-killed-my-idol-50119; May 6, 2011, Illustration by Jim L. Wilson and Jim Sandell.

Hebrews 11:17-19 (GW) (17) When God tested Abraham, faith led him to offer his son Isaac. Abraham, the one who received the promises from God, was willing to offer his only son as a sacrifice. (18) God had said to him, “Through Isaac your descendants will carry on your name.” (19) Abraham believed that God could bring Isaac back from the dead. Abraham did receive Isaac back from the dead in a figurative sense.