Starting Right
Starting Right is a 5 minute Day Starter to help keep you motivated, encouraged, and focused throughout your day. DannyMac is a pastor, teacher, motivational speaker, husband, and father. His years of leading and training people have given him vast experience in helping individuals to accomplish change in their lives and meet their goals. He can help you set the course for your day by offering practical advice from God's Word in a positive and fun way. There is no better way to begin your day than by Starting Right with DannyMac.
Starting Right
Dreams Don't Expire
Dreams don't come with expiration dates. Giuseppe Paterno's remarkable journey proves this in spectacular fashion. At 96 years old, this Italian man graduated with first-class honors in philosophy, becoming Italy's oldest university graduate. His story serves as both inspiration and challenge to anyone who has abandoned their God-given dreams.
What dream has God planted within you that you've allowed to fade? What vision once burned brightly but has dimmed with time, responsibilities, and disappointment? The dreams God gives us come with the divine capacity to fulfill them, regardless of our age or circumstances. Perhaps today is the perfect time to dust off that treasure and begin pursuing it again. J
Good morning and welcome to Starting Right with Danny Mac. I'm going to be here every Monday to Friday to help you get a great five-minute start to your day. So grab your cup of coffee, sit back, relax and let me help you start your day right. In the King James Bible, in the book of Proverbs, the 29th chapter, in the 18th verse, it says where there is no vision, the people perish.
Speaker 1:Throughout the Bible we see many instances where God used dreams and visions to help people stay on track or to do something spectacular and wonderful. It was through this process that God led Abraham and Abimelech and Jacob and Joseph. God even gave a dream to Pilate's wife so that she would warn Pilate, saying hey, you don't want to mess with this guy. Jesus, god spoke through a vision to Cornelius, to Peter and to Paul. Many instances throughout the Bible God used visions and dreams.
Speaker 1:Now there are not many of us today who will see a lot of visions in the kind of things that we've talked about here. I believe God can and does still use visions like that to guide us and to show us. There's nothing in Scripture to say that he stopped doing that. In fact, peter in Acts 2, verse 17, quotes the book of Joel saying In the last days, god says I will pour out my Spirit upon all my people, and your sons and daughters will prophesy. Your young men will see visions and your and? While God will give us those miraculous visions and dreams, he often works in a much more subtle way as well, planting visions and dreams inside of us for our future, for things that he wants us to accomplish with our lives, the things that he wants us to do. And the tragedy of that often is that those visions and dreams fade away, they die, and we get older and we look back and we remember what they were, but we no longer hang on to them.
Speaker 1:I would like to tell you a story this morning about a man named Giuseppe, about the dream that he had for his life and how it finally came together for him. In July of last year, giuseppe Paterno graduated with first-class honors and a degree in philosophy from the University of Palermo in Sicily. He said it was one of the happiest days of his life. Now, that story is probably not all that unusual, except that Giuseppe Paterno he was 96 years old, making him Italy's oldest graduate ever. He grew up in a poor family in Sicily in the years before the Depression, and as a child, he only had some really basic schooling. During the Second World War, he joined the Navy and then, afterwards, he worked on the railroad and then, shortly thereafter, got married and had two children. But even then, there was this yearning inside of him to learn and to understand more. So, at the age of 31, he graduated from high school, and still he wanted to go further. He said that to me, knowledge is like a suitcase that I can carry with me. It is a treasure.
Speaker 1:So in 2017, at the age of 93, he enrolled in the University of Palermo. He said I understood that it was a little late to get a three-year degree, but I said to myself well, let's see if I can do it. So off he went and began to study as a student. He would complete his essays on an old manual typewriter that his mother had given him when he retired from the railways back in 1984. He didn't use Google. He didn't like Google. He. Instead, he went to all the printed books that he could find. He did say, though, that he was never tempted by the late-night student parties of his 20-year-old classmates.
Speaker 1:He was in the last portion of his final year when the pandemic hit, and he did confess to a little unease in dealing with the video calls that replaced the classroom teaching. As far as the coronavirus was concerned, he said he was really not put off by the disease itself. He said after the war and everything else he'd been through in his life, the coronavirus was not going to stop him. And when he talked about the students in his group he said it really didn't scare us all that much. Asked what he was going to do next, he said he was not about to stop. Now that he had graduated, he said my future project is to devote myself to writing. I want to revisit all the texts I didn't have a chance to explore further. This is really what my goal is right now.
Speaker 1:Proudly holding his graduation certificate in his hand, giuseppe recalled the questions his neighbors asked him frequently. They used to say why all this trouble at your age? He smiled, looked at the certificate in his hand and then said they just didn't understand the significance of a dream, a dream that you've had all of your life. So much of the time, god has planted something deep within us. When we were younger, we had a goal, we had an idea, we had something that we wanted to do and accomplish and then, somewhere along the line, we let that fade out and we let it go away.
Speaker 1:Yet God has not let go of that dream that he's planted within us. And when God plants something within us, he gives us the ability to see it through, to make it happen, to cause it to come out of us, because it's part of why we are here to make it happen, to cause it to come out of us, because it's part of why we are here. If God has planted something within you, stir it up again. You are never too old to learn. You're never too old to create what God is wanting you to create and become. Be blessed, my friends, and be a blessing. Have a great day. We'll talk to you again tomorrow. Thank you for listening today and I invite you to join me Monday to Friday, right here on Starting Right with Danny Mac.
