Dear friend,
I want to tell you something tonight that I have never written down before.
Not because I forgot it. I have never forgotten a single detail of it. But because it is the kind of thing that a man in my position is careful about saying out loud. The kind of thing that invites skepticism from the people who do not believe in such things and the wrong kind of credulity from the people who believe in too many of them.
I am not a man who claims to receive visions. I am not a man who speaks lightly about divine communication. I have been with the Church for fifty years and I have watched too many people mistake their own wishful thinking for the voice of God to be careless about the distinction.
But I have also been honest with you about the things that have shaped me. And this shaped me. Profoundly. In ways I am still understanding thirty years later.
So tonight I am finally writing it down.
It was winter. I remember that much. I remember the cold coming through the window and the particular quality of the silence that deep winter produces. I had been carrying something heavy for several months. A question I could not resolve. Not a theological question. A personal one. About whether the work I was doing mattered. Whether the fifty years I had given to the Church had produced anything real or whether I had simply been busy in a way that looked like faithfulness from the outside and felt increasingly hollow from the inside.
I had prayed about it. Many times. And the silence I received back had become its own kind of answer that I was not ready to accept.
And then I had a dream.
I want to be careful about how I describe this because I want to be accurate.
It was not a dramatic dream. There was no angel standing in light. No voice from the sky. No symbolic vision full of beasts and numbers that required interpretation.
It was simple. Almost unbearably simple.
I was standing in a very large room. I could not see the walls or the ceiling. Just the floor beneath me and a vast darkness in every direction. And in that darkness there were lights. Thousands of them. Small ones. The kind of light a single candle makes.
And I understood — in the way you understand things in dreams without being told them — that each light was a person. Someone who had been given something. Not something dramatic. Something small. A word. A passage of Scripture. A letter. Something that had landed in the darkness of their life and produced a light that I could see from where I was standing but that they could not see themselves.
And I stood there looking at thousands of small lights in the darkness and I understood that I had not been able to see them from where I was standing in my waking life. That the work looked like nothing from the inside and looked like this from somewhere else.
And then I woke up.
I lay awake for a long time afterward.
Not because the dream was frightening. Because it was the specific answer to the specific question I had been carrying. Not delivered in the way I expected. Not accompanied by the kind of certainty that makes doubt impossible. Just a dream. That I could explain away if I wanted to. That I have never been able to explain away.
I want to be honest with you about what I believe and what I do not know.
I do not know with certainty that it was God. I believe it was. I have believed it for thirty years. But I am a careful man and I will not claim certainty I do not have.
What I know is that it changed something. That the question I had been carrying for months was simply not there when I got out of bed that morning. Not answered in a way I could argue from. Just gone. Replaced by something quieter and more durable than the answer I had been looking for.
In Joel chapter 2 verse 28 God said I will pour out my Spirit on all people. Your sons and daughters will prophesy. Your old men will dream dreams.
Your old men will dream dreams.
I am an old man. I had a dream. I have been turning it over for thirty years. And I still believe it was trying to show me something I could not see from where I was standing.
I want to tell you why I am sharing this tonight.
Because I think many of you are standing where I was standing before that dream. In the middle of work that feels like nothing. In the middle of faithfulness that is producing no visible result. In the middle of prayers that feel like they are going nowhere and effort that feels like it is dissolving into the air.
And you cannot see the lights.
Not because they are not there. Because you are inside the room looking at the walls. And the lights are in the darkness on the other side of the walls. And you would need to be standing somewhere else entirely to see what your faithfulness is actually producing.
I want to tell you what I believe the dream was telling me. And what I believe it is telling you tonight.
The work is not nothing. The prayers are not nothing. The quiet, faithful, unseen things you have been doing in the dark are producing lights that you cannot see from where you are standing.
You are not standing in the right place to see them yet.
But they are there.
I want to connect something to what I have been describing.
The lights in that dream were not produced by dramatic things. Not by the powerful sermons or the influential moments or the things that felt significant at the time. They were produced by small things. Words. Letters. Passages of Scripture given to specific people at specific moments.
I have thought about that often as I have been writing to you this year.
Every letter I send goes out into a darkness I cannot see. I do not know which ones land. I do not know which words find the person who needed them. I do not know whose 3am was changed by something I wrote at my desk in the afternoon. I cannot see the lights from where I am standing.
But I believe they are there. The dream showed me that they are there. And I have believed it for thirty years.
That belief is part of why I wrote They Tried To Stop Him: What The Bible Says About Donald Trump. Because I believed that one more light in the darkness — one more person who understood what was happening and why and what God appeared to be doing in it — was worth the effort of writing it down. Even if I could not see who it would reach. Even if it went out into a darkness I could not see and landed somewhere I would never know about.
You are reading this letter. Which means it reached you. Which means there is a light somewhere in the darkness that I cannot see.
If you have not read the guide yet — if you are the person who has been carrying a question about what is happening in this country and why and whether any of it has a pattern that God is working through — I believe it will give you something. Not certainty. Something quieter than certainty and more durable. You can find it by clicking on the image below:
Alternatively, you may find it here: https://fatherthomasletters.com/products/they-tried-to-stop-him-what-the-bible-says-about-donald-trump
I want to close with the thing the dream left me with that has never fully left.
The lights were small. Every single one of them. There was not a single blazing fire in the darkness. Just thousands of small flames. The kind that a single candle makes. Fragile looking from a distance. But present. And real. And producing together a light that was genuinely extraordinary when you could see all of them at once.
You are one of those lights.
Not a blazing fire. You do not need to be. Just the specific, small, faithful light that your specific life in your specific place produces when you keep showing up. When you keep praying. When you keep believing the things that cost you something to believe.
The darkness does not extinguish small flames. It makes them visible.
Keep burning, friend. The darkness needs exactly what you are producing.
God bless you. More than you know tonight.
With you in prayer always,
Father Thomas
This week I want you to do two things:
One. Read Joel chapter 2 verses 28 through 32 this week. The promise of dreams and visions poured out on ordinary people. Let it expand your understanding of how God speaks. And then pay attention this week to the quiet moments — the ones that do not announce themselves — where something might be trying to reach you.
Two. Read They Tried To Stop Him this week: https://fatherthomasletters.com/products/they-tried-to-stop-him-what-the-bible-says-about-donald-trump
I wrote it as one more small light sent out into a darkness I could not see. If it reaches you and gives you something — that is enough. That is exactly what the dream showed me thirty years ago.
P.S. If you want to go deeper on anything I have written, everything is available at fatherthomasletters.com/products — including The Signs Are Here, which maps today's headlines directly against the specific passages that described them, and the Father Thomas Prayer Card Collection, which many of you have told me you return to every morning. Take a look when you have a moment.