When I was young I wanted to be a professional baseball player. I dreamed of being the best baseball player who ever played. In the off-season my dream was to be a missionary to some remote part of the planet. I was going to grow up to be like Bo Jackson, except my second sport would be helping people.

When I was in high-school I dreamed about being in workout magazines. My dad always talked about the old workout heroes like Arnold and Ferrigno and Reeves and I wanted to be a part of that. I dreamed that one day I would be in Muscle and Fitness and have people reading about me.

As long as I can remember I’ve dreamed about writing a book. I wanted to tell people stories that would take them to another place and let them be another person. And I wanted them to come back as a different person than the one that left. I’ve always dreamed of having words I’ve written be read after I’m gone.

I’ve always dreamed of going to places and trying things no one else would be dumb enough to try.

I think humans are dreamers at their core. I think the soul of every child is built to dream.

But then at some point during our advance to adulthood we are taught to stop being silly cause dreams are for kids. We learn that dreams are great but they don’t pay the bills. We see that dreams end in disaster far more often than they do success.

So we stop dreaming and start surviving instead.

And that’s good because it leads to respectable adults who in turn raise respectable kids to eventually be other respectable adults. And we need that as a society.

But.

BUT.

But we also need the dreamers.

Society needs Einstein to dream about physics and the Wright brothers to dream about being able to fly. The world needs Christine Caine to dream about ending sex slavery and George Washington Carver to dream about peanuts. We people to dream about doing things no one else would dream of doing.

God built children to dream. Every child has used a clothes pin to secure a towel around their neck so they could fly. Or slipped on their mothers high heels and walked the imaginary catwalk. Or played “the floor is lava.”

Each of us believed we could accomplish our wildest dreams when we were younger. We believed in kings and queens and battles over good and evil. But then we got older and stopped chasing those dreams and started settling for routine.

Your big dream may be starting your own business or starting your own family. It may be moving across the country or moving across the world. Your dream might be painting or building or inventing or loving or giving. Dreams are as individual as humans. Indescribably so.

God gives each of us a dream to accomplish in this short life. And it’s up to each of us not to waste it.

Imagine where we would be if Edison had stopped dreaming about light or Jobs had stopped dreaming about computers. Imagine what America would look like if MLK hadn’t told us about his dream. Or how the world would look if a small group of rebel men and women had stopped dreaming about freedom.

Sometimes you just have to ask yourself if you would rather look back and say, “at least I tried,” or “I wish I’d tried.”

I for one would rather waste my life chasing dreams than waste my dreams chasing a normal life.