Your Old Ones Shall Dream Dreams

She is seventy-one and she says the same thing every time, and she says it kindly, and she means it as humility.

Oh, that is for the young ones now.

She has said it about the prayer meeting. She has said it about the missions weekend. She said it last spring when a girl of about twenty asked her to teach her how to pray, and she laughed and said she was past all that and put the kettle on.

She has been in that church for fifty-three years. There is not one thing about that building she does not know. She has prayed people through cancer and through divorce and through the drink, and when the roof went in eighty-nine she was up the ladder herself, which she is not supposed to tell anybody.

And somewhere in the last few years, without a decision being made, a window went down in her.

Not slammed. Nobody slammed it. It just settled, the way a sash window settles when the cord has gone, an inch at a time over a season, until one day you notice it is shut and you cannot remember it closing.

That is for the young ones now.

Now let me set her down and sit with you a minute, because I am not talking about her.

When did you decide the window had closed on you?

Joel named the old on purpose

There is a promise that the whole thing stands on, and Peter quoted it on the first day of the Church, and it was already hundreds of years old when he did.

And afterward, I will pour out My Spirit on all people. Your sons and daughters will prophesy, your old men will dream dreams, your young men will see visions.Joel 2:28

Now read the middle of that list, which is the part folk skip. You are in it by name, and dreaming is not what the Holy Spirit hands out once the useful part is over. It is one of the three things He said He would do.

Now I want you to notice something plain, the way we notice things on a porch.

He could have stopped at all people. That would have covered it. Every person who has ever lived is inside those two words and nobody could argue.

He did not stop there. He wrote a list, and the list is doing work.

Sons and daughters, so neither one could be told it was the other's. Old and young, both named, so that neither end of a life could claim it had missed the window. Servants, in the next verse, men and women, named specifically, so the people at the bottom of that society could not be quietly filed out.

Every clause in that list is a door being held open for exactly the person who assumed the promise had gone past them.

And here is what I want you to hear, said plain.

You are named in that sentence. Not by category, by name. The word says your old men will dream dreams, and dreaming is not what you do when the useful part is over. It is listed there beside prophesying and seeing, as one of the three things the Holy Spirit does when He falls on a house.

The old are not the audience of that promise. They are one third of its content.

And that humble little sentence you have been saying, that is for the young ones now, is not humility. I say that gently and I say it as somebody who has said it herself. Real humility never has to rewrite a promise to make room for itself.

Now, hear the good news underneath, because this is the part that matters.

You are already the one they come to. The girl who asked you to teach her to pray was not being polite. She had watched you. She had worked out where the depth in that building actually sat, and she walked past the platform to get to your kitchen. Scripture says the Spirit is poured out on all people, and the Holy Spirit has been putting people in front of you for fifty-three years, and He has not started sending them somewhere else.

The fire that this house is named for fell in a stable in 1906 on a room full of people the city had already written off, and among them were old women who had been praying since before the building was a building. Nobody in that room had been vetted for age.

He never has run a room by the birthdays.

And you are named in that list, not gathered up at the end of it. The word says your old men will dream dreams in the same breath as the young see visions, and the Spirit He poured out never once consulted a birthday.