Never Too Old To Dream

A quiet nudge can carry more power than a lightning bolt. That’s the heartbeat of today’s five-minute reset as we explore how vision shapes a meaningful life, why our deepest aims often go dormant, and how to bring them back to life with small, faithful steps. We anchor the conversation in Proverbs 29:18 and the many moments Scripture shows God stirring people through dreams and subtle guidance, then move to a remarkable modern story that turns belief into action.
Meet Giuseppe Paterno, who enrolled in the University of Palermo at ninety-three and graduated with first class honors at ninety-six. His journey through poverty, war, rail work, and family responsibilities would have been reason enough to file learning under “not now.” Instead, he wrote essays on a manual typewriter, studied from printed books, and adapted when the pandemic moved classes online. His example reframes the question from “Am I too late?” to “What can I start with today?” It’s a masterclass in persistence, purpose, and practical focus.
We talk through the difference between waiting for a dramatic vision and responding to the quieter call you’ve carried for years. If a dream still tugs—study, craft, writing, service—there’s a good chance it’s part of your assignment. You’ll hear simple, actionable ways to restart: name your aim in one line, commit to a small weekly practice, remove one avoidable barrier, and involve one person who will keep you honest. The goal isn’t speed; it’s consistency. The payoff is the return of energy, clarity, and hope.

If you’ve been looking for a reason to begin again, consider this your invitation. Subscribe for weekday encouragement, share this with someone who needs a push, and leave a review to tell us what dream you’re choosing to revive next.

Chapters

• 0:00 Welcome And Five-Minute Focus
• 0:22 Vision In Scripture
• 1:29 Dreams Planted In Our Hearts
• 1:57 Giuseppe’s Lifelong Goal
• 2:31 Choosing Learning At Ninety-Three
• 3:41 Pandemic, Perseverance, And Purpose
• 4:46 Stir The Dream Again

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:05

Good morning and welcome to Starting Right with Danny Mack. 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. 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. Now there are not many of us today who will see a lot of visions and 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. And in fact, Peter in Acts chapter two, verse seventeen, 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 old men will dream dreams. 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. 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 ninety six 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 thirty one 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. So in twenty seventeen, at the age of ninety three, 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 nineteen eighty four. 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 twenty year old classmates. 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. 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. 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. 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 Mack.