Members and Friends of Austin Mennonite Church I pray you are blessed as you reflect on the provisions that God has supplied for your journey through time. May thanksgiving be a spiritual refreshment as tougher we honor the purpose and intention of the creator God for all of life and its complete expression. Dreams and visions mysteriously appear in our conscious awareness in ways that both intrigue us to analysis and provoke us to contemplation. Various explanations exist for the origin of these puzzling occurrences. One of the most attractive suggestions proposes that these episodes actually work to help us manage our confrontations and frustrations with reality as we perceive it. Rather than dreams being a kind of byproduct while we sleep, this theory speculates that we sleep in order that we may dream. Understood in this way, dreams are the provision for us to make sense of our experience-a way of relating and associating our perceptions so as to provide to us a reason to continue living in our environment. The biblical witness represents dreams and visions as sacred incidents, having a unique capacity to unite time-restricted observations with eternal 'truth.' If we recognize that reason and truth are functionally synonymous, then in dream we may be accessing a spiritual path that connects human nature with divine presence-a way of helping us to conform our improvised reason to primordial truth. The question, 'What is truth?' both for Pilate and for us therefore might be a two-pronged inquiry: not only the quest for certainty but also the search to discover its place in our practical everyday existence. These thoughts will compose the sermon for this next Sunday, 'A reason worthy of faith.' May it go well with you. Sincerely, Garland Robertson ...always hold firmly to the thought that each one of us can do something to bring some portion of misery to an end