I am sitting in one of my favourite coffee shops, Starbucks all the way over in Washington DC Mike Honeywell and I are on the way to a church planting conference in Orlando, Florida tomorrow. On the way we decided to stop over and attend a few churches in Washington to see what we could learn!

Having been in Washington before, I spent the first day taking Mike to see the White House,, Lincoln memorial, Capitol Hill and the Air and Space Institute (the palce they display the old space missions and air travel etc The most visited meusem in the world) . Having seen it all before, it was great to see it again especially through the eyes of someone else who had never been here before! 

It was the most amazing day, the weather was stunning, blue sky, the cherry blossoms are breathtakingly beautiful at this time of the year!! A first for me! so, as we wondered around something began to grip me about Washington. I began to understand the largeness of the Town Planner who laid out Washington all those many years ago! He must have had BIG vision! He made it "grande" as my Brazilian friends would say. The ability to forsee down through hundreds of years and plan for the future and make sure it was large enough! It got me thinking about us, South Africans and how we have so much space, yet live ontop of each other! How we have become confined in our small boxes, closed behind our high walls, secure of course but are we atrophying on the inside? Has the all this caused a "smallness" of vision to cateract our eyes??

On holiday, I went to the optician with my glasses as they were only six months old yet I was finding that my vision was getting very fuzzy. Thinking that it was a problem with my very expensive multifocals, I complained to the Optician! After another quick eye test, she gave me the devastating news! "Your vision in the left eye has worsened by 2 points in the last six months" she said. Why??? "Cateracts" she said. My left eye is being taken over by a cateract and causing my visoin to be impaired. Of course I am trusting God to heal or at least slow down the process, but it seems that God has me in a parable!

What is blinkering my vision, what is growing over my spiritual eyes? What has slowly made my vision fuzzy? How have I began to see only the small, the now, the little??

Now, back to Washington and dreaming. As I was walking around this amazing city, large and magnificent, God popped a question into my spirit. "How do you keep your people dreaming?" I thought of how the Americans are large thinkers, dreamers, man on the moon people, nothing impossible! Patriotic, proud and extremely loyal. What has caused them to be like this, even if it seems to be opposite to our upbringing? I began to wonder if the way they have preserved the dreams and fulfillment of those dreams from the past has been one key to keeping them dream big dreams? Look what we dreamed, look what we took on, man on the moon in ten years. Impossible? Possible, done that, now lets shoot for the stars! Everything they do here is BIG! Their cars are large, their cities are massive, their homes are grand, and everything is done with such excellence. What makes them big thinkers, dreamers, can do people?

I don't have the answers, but I have been stirred, my head is being lifted, my visual impairment is hopefully being disolved a little to see further, bigger, clearer, to see what God sees, what God dreams of for me, for us, for His Bride!

Have a stunning week and we will talk soon!