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Dreams and Destiny
Seventeen. What did you dream about when you were seventeen? Did you dare to dream? Were you allowed to dream? Were you laughed at for your dreams? Perhaps family or peers were threatened by your dream. Or are you the product of an environment where you were encouraged to think big and dream impossible dreams? And if you are not yet seventeen or are well beyond seventeen, what grand things do you dream about now?
I was a dreamer. You see, I came from a land that was then said to have three million people and seventy million sheep. That’s great if your life’s grand ambition is making woolen jumpers or Roquefort cheese, but it’s not necessarily a launching pad for dreaming of building anything with worldwide influence and impact. Interestingly, this small land in the Southern Ocean has produced (among many other fine endeavors) the first man to climb Mount Everest and the first man to split the atom. It is home to the famous landscape displayed in the splendor of the Lord of the Rings movies, as well as many world-renowned entertainers, actors, athletes, and businesspeople. Plus of course it boasts the world’s most successful and famed rugby team, the New Zealand All Blacks. So maybe, just maybe, humble beginnings are the perfect soil for a blossoming and fruitful life.
In the 1960s, my family lived in a state house, which was a government-owned, timber-lined dwelling that stood like a sullen soldier among all the other similar houses in Taita, Lower Hutt, New Zealand. It was a working-class suburb, with all the associated social problems, just outside Wellington.
Nothing in particular stood out about me as a child or teenager. I found it impossible to concentrate in school, and my long legs were more of a hindrance than a help when it came to the sporting field.
I have vivid memories of my journey home from Hutt Valley High School. I began my daily walk from the train station onto High Street before turning left past the Tocker Street Dairy, our local convenience store, where, if I had any change, I would stop to buy hokey-pokey ice cream (vanilla ice cream with small bits of honeycomb toffee throughout). Then I would veer right onto Reynolds Street, past Pearce Crescent, Molesworth Street, and Compton Crescent, before finally turning into Nash Street, and I would walk past three houses before arriving home at the corner of Nash Street and Taita Drive. And day after day, on that repetitious walk home, my young, shy, but adventurous mind used to dream and dream and dream. It was a dream that always seemed to follow a similar narrative.
For as long as I can remember, I wanted to someday serve Jesus and preach the gospel. In fact, I cannot remember a time when that wasn’t what I dreamed of doing. I dreamed in the school classroom, I dreamed on that journey home, and I dreamed while sitting in church twice on a Sunday, every Sunday throughout my childhood.
It was then that I imagined speaking to big crowds or traveling the world, leading thousands of people to Jesus Christ and maybe one day building a great church. I would also wonder who my wife would be, what she would look like, where she was, and what she was doing at that very moment. And I dreamed that maybe I would meet her—that one person who would want to pursue this dream with me.
Fast-forward forty-plus years, and I have found myself on a much longer journey than that childhood walk home from the train station. It’s been this ongoing adventure called life, in which this small-town daydreamer has found himself living in the realization of those dreams and in the wonder of even bigger ones.
Dare to Dream
As I mentioned, concentration was never my strong point. I distinctly remember that the comments of my schoolteachers followed a theme: “Brian doesn’t listen”; “Brian could do so much better if he didn’t daydream”; “Brian procrastinates.”
In the 1960s, our church congregation was about five hundred to six hundred people. At the time, it was possibly the largest church in the country, but it was still not an especially large group. Looking back now, I realize that if I had shared my wide-eyed, wonderful, and global dreams out loud, many would have politely laughed or perhaps shared a patronizing smile with other adults nearby. For a young pastor’s son from a low-income neighborhood in an astoundingly beautiful land of millions of sheep, what outrageous dreams they were! Although I never got the feeling that anyone had high expectations about my future, I just kept on dreaming anyway.
When I was seventeen years old, I held eleven different jobs to raise enough money to go to Bible college. That’s too many jobs to name, but not one of them was my passion. Yet I worked hard because I was preparing and planning for the things I was passionate about. So, despite the odds against me and the jobs I didn’t want, I never lost sight of the dreams in my heart.
I believe that the ability to dream is one of God’s greatest gifts. So let me ask you again, what do you dream about? Do you dream of things far bigger than you are? I believe it was those wild dreams of mine as a boy that led me to Bible college and set me on the path I find myself on today.
The Bigger the Better
Have you ever heard the saying “If you aim at nothing, you’ll hit it every time”? Well, in the same way, if you aim at a target, you might not hit the bull’s-eye, but at least you’ll get as close as you can. Even if your dreams become only 80 percent real, it’s still better than nothing at all!
The truth is, you should shoot for the moon. God gave you the ability to dream, to create, and to imagine endless possibilities. In many ways, dreaming is just like faith, and the size of your dream can be in direct correlation to your belief in what God can achieve. In my opinion, if you’re dreaming about something you can do on your own, you’re dreaming too small! God-sized dreams are dreams that can be done only when you put your faith in the Creator, the One who knows the beginning from the end and who desires your future to be filled with hope and abundance. So much potential perishes because of the lack of an audacious dream.
So, what did your life look like when you were seventeen? What was it that made you drift off from the present and dream about the future? Are you still dreaming now? Perhaps you didn’t dream of anything outrageous or were never prone to believe for something outside your current reality, but I believe that everyone should have a dream—a dream bigger than he is and one that is impossible to fulfill in an individual’s own strength. Dreams come in varied forms. You can consciously dream by having aspirations for your future, and you can physically dream through visions in your sleep. I believe that God can work through and speak to us in both ways. Dreaming is important, as your dreams can become your destiny. So if you don’t have a dream, you are limiting your destiny.
I dare you to dream big, scary, and outrageous dreams—the kind that would make other people laugh if only they knew. The Bible tells us about a seventeen-year-old dreamer exactly like that. This young man dreamed an outrageous dream, and for him, that dream was only the beginning.
The Sun, the Moon, and the Stars
The young dreamer I’m talking about is, of course, Joseph. Here is the story of his dream:
Joseph, being seventeen years old, was pasturing the flock with his brothers. He was a boy with the sons of Bilhah and Zilpah, his father’s wives. And Joseph brought a bad report of them to their father. Now Israel loved Joseph more than any other of his sons, because he was the son of his old age. And he made him a robe of many colors. But when his brothers saw that their father loved him more than all his brothers, they hated him and could not speak peacefully to him.
Now Joseph had a dream, and when he told it to his brothers they hated him even more. He said to them, “Hear this dream that I have dreamed: Behold, we were binding sheaves in the field, and behold, my sheaf arose and stood upright. And behold, your sheaves gathered around it and bowed down to my sheaf.” His brothers said to him, “Are you indeed to reign over us? Or are you indeed to rule over us?” So they hated him even more for his dreams and for his words.
Then he dreamed another dream and told it to his brothers and said, “Behold, I have dreamed another dream. Behold, the sun, the moon, and eleven stars were bowing down to me.” But when he told it to his father and to his brothers, his father rebuked him and said to him, “What is this dream that you have dreamed? Shall I and your mother and your brothers indeed come to bow ourselves to the ground before you?” And his brothers were jealous of him, but his father kept the saying in mind.” (Genesis 37:1–11, ESV)
Sheaves of grain bowing down to him, and even the sun, the moon, and the stars! From where Joseph sat, tending sheep in the land of Canaan, his dreams looked absurd. Talk about shooting for the moon—he imagined that even the moon would be within his grasp!
When I dreamed as a child about traveling to places I had learned about in school, there was nothing in the natural that made these dreams look possible. I would take a pen and doodle on the back of my schoolbooks pictures of such places as Paris, with its outdoor cafés, poodles, and endless baguettes. I dreamed about London, with its unique black cabs, double-decker buses, and destinations I knew from our family Monopoly board, such as Fleet Street, Coventry Street, Park Lane, and Mayfair. And I was always fascinated by bigger places, such as Australia or other countries that then seemed so far away. The United States of America and everything it offered seemed like another world back then. Today those dreams have become so much a part of my life that I hardly think about the fact that they were once a dream.
How often do you believe for the impossible?
About twenty years ago, I spent an afternoon in my office with a blank piece of paper in front of me and wrote down the words “The Church That I See.” Quite miraculously, the amazing thing is that thirty years on, in many ways, those words I wrote down are reflective of the church we now lead. But it wasn’t always that way.
In 1983, Hillsong Church was a gathering of less than one hundred people in a tiny school hall. It was a passionate, vibrant, young community of believers, along with a few almost believers and even nonbelievers, putting out chairs, sweeping the floor, and praying in a broom closet before and after services each Sunday. The “stage” was a road case, and the quality of the band was modest at best. Hillsong Church looks very different now, but many of the values that we built on are the same today.
Hillsong has always been a worshipping church. Before there was Hillsong UNITED; before there was Hillsong Young & Free, before there was “Shout to the Lord,” “Mighty to Save,” or “Oceans,” there was worship. Passionate worship. It wasn’t always polished, there weren’t always lights, and in those early years, there wasn’t even a stage, but we worshipped. We sang and we began to take baby steps in writing songs that resounded in the hearts of the people in our community. Sure, the piano had one or two notes that didn’t work and was out of tune, and the drummer didn’t keep a steady beat. Jack, our smiling senior accordion player and his wife, Elaine, not only were a part of the band but also looked after the tiny group of kids in our children’s ministry, including our own four-year-old and eighteen-month-old sons. Those were rough, raw, pioneering days, but the fruit of the labor of many faithful people early on began to give way to opportunities beyond our wildest dreams.
It was on that piece of paper, more than two decades ago, that I wrote these words: “I see a church whose heartfelt praise and worship touches heaven and changes earth—worship that influences the praises of people throughout the earth, exalting Christ with powerful songs of faith and hope.”
Only one year before I wrote that, in 1992, the very first live Hillsong album was released: The Power of Your Love. But even before that, we recorded our first musical effort, Spirit and Truth, in a tiny home studio. I was so proud of that little collection of original songs that, when I had the chance as a pastor to speak at a citywide gathering of hundreds of ministers (almost all older, wiser, and more seasoned than I was), I made them first listen to some of the songs. I can still see the blank stares sending a clear message that no one in the room was anywhere near as excited about this as I was. But the idea of recording an album simply came from our passion to worship God in our local church, along with the belief that our local church was called to resource other local churches with words and music that would glorify our worthy God. At the time, we never could have imagined that our albums would be sung throughout the earth, but we had a belief that God had called us to do something with what was in our hands and that, as we were faithful, He would also be faithful.
Now, more than ninety albums later, God is growing and stretching and changing the story of Hillsong Worship. But it was long before those first albums that the songs of God and the sound of our house were established as a priority, an arrowhead, and a cornerstone of who we are—all because of a God-breathed dream.
The Bible tells us in Zechariah 4:10, “Do not despise these small beginnings” (NLT). Whatever it is God has entrusted into your hand—your family, your career, your ministry, or whatever—don’t count it as insignificant. Whatever dreams are in your heart and still seem like a world away, don’t be discouraged! I believe that in the eyes of God and with His leading, wisdom, favor, and provision, if you hold fast to that dream He has placed in your heart, you, like Joseph, will see it come to pass.
