Book Review: The Dream Giver

Title: The Dream Giver

Author: Bruce Wilkinson

Publisher: Multnomah

Date: 2003

ISBN: 1-59052-201-X

Length: 158 pages

Quote: “Do you believe every person on earth was born with a dream for his or her life?”

Wilkinson does. This follow-up, not part of the series that began with The Prayer of Jabez, is for and about Christians who dream about bigger and better ways to serve God, and it winds up to an appeal on behalf of Wilkinson’s own Dream of using the money he made from The Prayer of Jabez and related material to fund a medical missionary “Global Vision.” While that name leaves me cold I’m pleased to read that this record-selling writer wanted to invest his wealth in humanitarian mission work.

Along the way he shares general advice about how, in both intuitive and objective senses, people can say that God guides their pursuit of their dreams. He belabors a “parable” or prototype story where the source of big dreams is merely “the Dream Giver,” not even “God,” probably to avoid getting into debates and schisms about the extent to which Christians should take the idea of personal guidance from God literally. He discusses the ways his dreams have come true, leading through hard work, apparent failure, and some sudden, apparently undeserved successes.

Even in the Christian community, the publishing phenomenon that was The Prayer of Jabez caused a certain amount of unholy (and unhealthy) griping. What made Jabez so special? (My guess: his short prayer could be discussed in a short book whose small, user-friendly size and type were meant to lure readers into buying the rest of a series that presented Bible studies that expound on the same ideas summarized in The Dream Giver. Some people who are intimidated by one big book are willing to buy a series of small ones, so publishers like to do them every few years, and the rest is history.) What made the book about him so special? Wilkinson is a sound Bible student and a competent writer, but so are a lot of other Christians who never have had, and never will have, their perfectly good books become runaway bestsellers like The Prayer of Jabez. From some of the griping arose an odor (easily confused with parmesan cheese) of “Why the b…h… was it him instead of ME-e-e?”

For a mere blogger it’s easy, but for some lifelong teachers and authors it seems to be more difficult, to accept that in the normal course of events books do not sell like The Prayer of Jabez. In the normal course of events, if a Bible study book climbs high enough on booksellers’ “midlists” to get into secular bookstores, it’s doing well, and if it sells well in big-chain secular bookstores, that’s probably because the author is a movie star or former President of the United States or at least a bestselling novelist. So we can’t rule out the possibility that what happened with The Prayer of Jabez was a miracle, a special blessing poured out on Wilkinson for the benefit of his mission dream.

His "Teach the World Ministry" is still alive. He's eighty-three. His blog's a rehash of sections from his books, but he's still active, even in cyberspace.

So, will The Dream Giver seem like a review to those who read the whole Jabez series? Not exactly. Though full of Bible references, it’s more of a personal guide to identifying what your own big dream is and where you are on the road to making it come true. Wilkinson encourages readers but he’s honest: some people who deserved to see their dreams come true die before that happens. Sometimes their dreams have to be picked up and carried on by others. Christians do not necessarily attract to ourselves all the success we can vividly imagine ourselves having, no. Indeed, for some of us (like Grandma Bonnie Peters), too much attention to a vision of ultimate, ideal, spectacular success can lead us into decisions that undo the progress we’ve actually already made. Still, on the whole, most people do make some progress toward their dreams in their own lifetime; certainly those who have dreams and pursue them are happier than those who don’t, and more interesting to know. Therefore, those who are open to a Christian approach can benefit from a book that encourages Christians to pursue their dreams.

“At…this age?” some may yelp, incredulously. Hey. There’s a reason why this book has the sharply focussed, full-color picture of Bruce Wilkinson, white hair and all; it’s on the inside flap, meaning publishers did not expect it to help sell the book because he’s all that handsome (those do look like his original teeth, at least). It is there to communicate that seniors, too, can apply whatever successes or at least experiences we’ve already gained toward the pursuit of our current Big Dreams. At the very least seniors with Big Dreams are livelier and more pleasant to look at than seniors who think their lives are over. A resolve to make good use of ten, twenty, fifty or however many years one has left won’t make one a movie star but it will keep one interesting.

So by all means, let this book encourage you to dream of the best, be prepared for the worst, and begin (or carry on with) your own quest to realize your Big Dream. Specific attention is given to working through fear, coping with unexpected opposition, walking through “Waste Land” periods without noticeable progress, laying all on the altar, challenging “giant” obstacles, and seeing your dream grow when it begins to come true.

Secular encouragement often recommends that “laying all on the altar” means sacrificing everything else in pursuit of your dream. Wilkinson provides a valuable corrective, which I wish GBP had read. Christians are serving God, not our own dreams. Therefore what may have to be sacrificed is, for the time being, our dreams themselves. To a lot of people this chapter may not make much sense and may seem like an unnecessary “downer.” I want to expound on it because I’ve seen a situation where it made perfect sense. Perhaps it will make sense to readers, too, if they understand the kind of thing that a few—not all—Christians encounter in the pursuit of our dreams.

This is undoubtedly why the Bible includes that awful story about the sacrifice of Isaac. Isaac was a good thing; killing him would have been a very bad thing. God did not, in fact, want that to happen. God did want Abraham and all the people to be absolutely clear about Abraham’s commitment to God ahead of Isaac.

With hindsight it became clear to those involved with GBP’s Allergy-Ease Foods that the business prospered as long as adherence to God’s biblical guidelines for business practice were followed; when GBP wanted to move ahead too fast, selling land and attempting to take out loans, she lost everything. It is not always the case, of course, that our conscious dreams for our lives “fly forgotten as a dream dies at the opening day” when, and because, we make a decision that might be morally or ethically debatable. GBP was quite right in pleading, “But lots of other people build fortunes from debts!” They do but, perhaps because she had preached and practiced “Owe no man any thing” for so long, she did not. And there seems little doubt that if she had sacrificed the dream of placing her products in big-chain stores across the continent (when she didn’t even have a way to produce that many of them), if she had been content to keep placing a carton of frozen food in an independent store here and a batch of soup in a restaurant there, she would have had a thriving business to hand down to the little girl in the drawing on the box. (That girl, who has a disability and a talent for cooking, had become the primary reason for wanting to keep the business growing and hand it down to her. She seemed to need to be the core of a family business. She still does. She grew up to be a “disabled” ward of the State.)

We are not meant to abandon our dreams lightly, we are certainly not meant literally to barbecue our children, but some of us are meant to make the decision to follow God’s guidelines even at the expense of “having something bigger and/or better to leave to the children.” I belabor this point here because I know a lot of people won’t understand the idea of being called to sacrifice our dreams. It does not make a lot of sense until you’ve seen it happen. I have, and I say it will make sense to those who need to understand it in their own way and time.

Not all readers will necessarily need to understand it. I believe the debunking of the 1980s’ “prosperity gospel” prepared me to understand how it might have been relevant to me. I don’t spend a lot of time bragging about an increasingly distant past, but yes, Gentle Readers, this penniless old widow whose confessions of poverty probably alienated some readers forevermore, this writer known as Priscilla King, was once a model of success and prosperity. For almost twenty years, I felt that I was directly guided in such a way that almost everything I did prospered.

While unemployable, really disabled by mononucleosis, and desperate I advertised typing and odd jobs; that became the odd jobs service that mopped up all the typing jobs and beat some big greedy agencies, which deserved it, out of town.

Also out of desperation, I agreed to be a backup foster parent; that decision never made much logical sense to me, but it worked well.

On what was frankly a vindictive whim, believing that massage didn’t do anyone any real good but I could certainly do it in a way that was less of a rip-off than my worst client’s business, I added massage to our list of odd jobs; clients convinced me that massage can provide real benefits so I took the exam, took courses, and made that a profitable business as the market for typing services dried up.

My chronic, deniable poor health started to turn into an undeniable, life-threatening illness; I found a cure for that illness and for the less acute, more chronic illness of several family members.

Mainly in return for a good business space, I hired a profoundly discouraged older man, who had been pushed out of his job in the belief that he had cancer, though he didn’t have the kind for which he’d been treated. He turned out to have impressive talents and, after a few years as best friends and teammates, we warily entered a marriage that made Carville and Matalin look like a well-matched couple. Until a different, unsuspected kind of cancer came back and killed him, we lived happily ever after.

Born dyspeptic, dyslexic, and never “the pretty one” in any gathering of three or more relatives, I was guided, partly through prayer and Bible study, yes, to grow into the kind of person who frequently hears “But everybody caaaan’t be as strong/smart/pretty as you are, you successful business owner, professional writer, diplomat’s trophy wife.” Not only was I seen as a blessed person; I myself felt almost more blessed than I could stand to be. That was in my late thirties. Then I hit forty. Ouch.

So what happened? I’ve often wondered, too. People always want to believe that any loss or lack in an adult’s life is the person’s own fault, somehow. People want to believe that about ourselves; if we were the ones who made a wrong decision, maybe we can change it, somehow, and get our lives back on track! But I’ve never been able to find a big mistake in my own life story, though people who didn’t know all of the story have often thought they’d found one. There were things I might have done differently, and better. There were things I blithely assumed to be true that I now know were not true. None of those things would have changed the outcome of the story, so far as I’ve ever been able to see. There were things that some people wanted to suggest were big mistakes--like affirming "introvert" as my primary identity label rather than trying to change or hide it, like celebrating my business's ethnic diversity and my own; I’ve considered whether those things were big mistakes and concluded, every time, that there’s no reason to believe they were mistakes at all. Apart from the first unwelcome development, my husband’s having multiple myeloma, all the other unwelcome developments in the story of my pre-midlife crisis were things other people did wrong. Some individuals know very well who they are and what they did, but what I feel that God revealed to me was that too many people have swallowed the socialists’ lie that all we need to do to “help” our friends is flap our mouths at them. I don’t often receive visual impressions in prayer but there are reasons, which some local lurkers should recognize, why more than once I prayed in desperation, “Lord, why didn’t this and that work? Why isn’t anything working? Why don’t You help?” and kept seeing the image of a very sick patient trying, and failing, to move his hands. We are the Body of Christ and some people’s belief that their babble, even if it refers to the Bible, is any kind of help to anybody (which St. James specifically debunked in the apostolic era) simply amounts to a paralysis of Christ’s hands. That’s the only explanation that’s ever made sense to me.

Sometimes, because a few people covet my land, someone sweetly hints, "Maybe God was leading you to be in a different place?" The impression I received was consistently that my marriage, and my time in Washington, were "by permission not by commandment," that I was meant to be where I am. It has seemed to me that my early success in Washington was all my own, that it was vulnerable for that reason, and that my next success, if I had one, was meant to be secured by other people's investments along with mine.

So, relative to The Dream Giver, I was sailing along and a tidal wave suddenly dumped my boat right in the middle of the Waste Land. And there, in some ways, I’ve been ever since; though one thing some people didn’t realize is that, throughout those years of prosperity in Washington, my dream actually involved being able to live at home. (I lived in Washington and various suburbs for a long time, with a sincere love and gratitude for the city—but the time I spent there was a means to an end that involved not having to spend any great amount of time in any city.) And although I might not have agreed with this part of Wilkinson’s vision in 2003, I’ve come to think it’s true. There are “dreamers” who end up spending all of the latter part of their lives in the Waste Land. Maybe there’s some purpose for that, or at least maybe they invent one. Maybe they help others pass through the Waste Land; maybe they leave their dreams behind for someone else to pick up and take right out of the Waste Land after they’ve died and been buried there. God knows. I don’t. Whatever beneficial purpose these things serve is not consistently visible to the human eye. God’s Creation is wasteful. Whenever any progress is made, it still always seems that an awful lot of people had to suffer and die before rabies vaccine could be invented, or water filtering technology could reach more than a ceremonial kind of usefulness, or the world could reach a consensus that hating whole ethnic groups is evil.

What the mind can conceive, and there may be every reason to believe, not everyone will necessarily achieve. And of course our social Comfort Zones tend to be lavishly supplied with Border Bullies who just love telling everyone that our big mistake was pursuing our silly dreams in the first place.

They can think of uglier lies than that, and they do. One I’ve heard is “God wants this source of distress, whatever it is, to be in your life because you need it! You need to give thanks for your pain/disability/poverty/failure/bereavement, because God sent it to you, because you needed it in order to grow spiritually!” The best answer to that is of course “Show me the Bible verse that teaches that God is less intelligent than any competent teenaged baby-sitter who knows that children learn best from rewards, or less charitable than any decent human being who knows that people who seem ‘sweet’ rather than ‘bitter’ when things go wrong are people who seemed ‘sweet’ rather than ‘bitter’ in the beginning. Your ‘God’ is what the Bible calls Satan, and I neither thank nor praise nor worship that. Get thee behind me Satan!”

Perhaps we’re better off with Wilkinson’s acceptance of the facts: we don’t know why some people achieve their dreams and others spend years in Waste Lands, though God’s gift of Consequence to human beings, which allows us to influence the outcome of others’ actions in what God may well find reward-worthy or blame-worthy ways, probably has something to do with it. Perhaps it’s literally true that in the resurrection our minds, which will be the trees of which our mortal minds are merely seeds, will be able to understand this. In our present form we’re not.

I expect, though, that people who read The Dream Giver will find themselves able to agree on one thing: it’s better to follow a dream that seems to lead into a Waste Land experience than it is to give up your dreams altogether. If I was never meant to be a great writer, which the generations after mine will be able to judge better than we are, I certainly was never built to do what’s most often recommended as the alternative—stay home and have babies; and I have indisputably had a vivid, varied, mostly enjoyable, and highly educational life as a writer, however minor or mediocre. If other people have forfeited their dreams by putting their dreams ahead of God (Saul in the Bible comes to mind) or simply died in Waste Lands (Jeremiah in the Bible comes to mind), well, at least they had dreams.