A Million Dreams

My job requires a great deal of data entry and monotonous paper filing. These tasks can get very lonely, and there are hours during the day when I have no human interaction at all. This past week I hit my breaking point and was consumed with an incredible claustrophobic feeling.

I retreated into prayer asking for relief from the Lord, and His answer was simple — He said, listen to music. The answer was so obvious, I was amazing that I hadn’t considered it sooner. I went to my Pandora app on my phone and searched “Disney.”

I needed something uplifting and I grew up in the 90’s when Disney was hitting its peak releasing one hit song after another, so I naturally just thought of those classic songs. My childhood was molded based off those classics like “The Circle of Life” from The Lion King, “The Colors of the Wind” from Pocahontas, and “You’ll Be in my Heart” from Tarzan, just to name a few.

Over the course of the week I could feel myself being brought back to life through the music. It didn’t just help me get me out of the solitude I was trapped in at my job, but it also awoke the dreams that I had when I was a child.

God blessed me with an extremely vivid imagination growing up. I would often make up stories in my head, and then go outside and act them out in my backyard. This imagination allowed me to believe that anything was possible.

When I grew up, reality entered into my soul and crippled all those dreams. I was diagnosed with a chronic disease, type one diabetes, and I lost my belief that anything was possible. My world went from multi-colored to stark, two-dimensional and black and white.

It has now been over ten years since being diagnosed and I am just now remembering what it feels like to believe in the impossible. I owe all of this to the inner workings of the Holy Spirit. His promptings to revisit the classic music of those childhood movies was the next step in His grand design.

Not all the songs that I have been listening to were from Disney; some songs came from a movie which was released last year, The Greatest Showman. I had seen it when it first came out and was truly taken by it. Like the classic Disney movies, it was inspiring. This one song, “A Million Dreams,” was especially invigorating.

“They can say it all sounds crazy.
They can say I’ve lost my mind.
I don’t care, so call me crazy.
We can live in a world that we design.

‘Cause every night I lie in bed
The brightest colors fill my head
A million dreams are keeping me awake.”

~The Greatest Showman, A Million Dreams

This song caused me to think how backwards life can be. This world has this ability to keep people from dreaming and longing for unimaginable possibilities, simply because this world claims them to be impossible. The world calls people “crazy” if they dare to be different.

Yet these movies like The Greatest Showman still come up, and they grow in popularity as the world takes notice. Why is this? Could it be because we are all starving for these dreams in our own lives? I believe God places these dreams into our hearts because it is His way of calling us home.

We live in this world but we are not of this world, so we retreat into our imaginations where “we can live in a world that we design.” This past week I have seen life through music and it has inspired me to live differently. I will seek the Holy Spirit to show me His world that He wishes me to live in, the world where anything is possible.

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Originally posted at Kitty in the City.
Photo: John Fowler, Unsplash / PD-US.