The first time Brett prayed for a Dream Center in Lake Elsinore, he was driving his son to preschool on the way to work, and the route took him past the old Ambassador Hotel on Main Street.
It was a broken season in his life, and he was mostly trying to survive. Something about that building caught his attention anyway. It looked to him like a small version of the Dream Center in Los Angeles, a place that had shaped him at 17, when he first sensed God’s call on his life. He had put that call on the shelf. Now he was looking at a boarded-up hotel and seeing the same needs in Lake Elsinore that the Dream Center met in Los Angeles, on a smaller scale.
So he started praying: God, would you put it on somebody’s heart to start a Dream Center here? The prayer became part of his morning drive. Over time it changed into something else. God, would you let me do this?
“You’re not ready”
In 2009 Brett asked his pastor for a meeting and shared the vision that was forming. His pastor told him he wasn’t ready. Brett was heartbroken, frustrated, and a little offended, and he spent at least a year processing it. The burden only grew. In 2011 he came back with a plan, sure the answer would be yes. It was no again, and that one stung.
In February 2013, at a pastors’ gathering at Azusa Pacific University, Matthew Barnett, who founded the Dream Center in Los Angeles, shared his whole story, including how hard it had been and how rewarding. Brett sat there in tears, taking notes on one side of his notebook and writing out a vision for Lake Elsinore on the other. He still has that tear-stained page, and nearly everything on it has since come to pass.
A couple of months later he took his pastor to lunch and read the whole thing to him. By the end they were both in tears, and his pastor said, “Brett, it’s time.”
What that first yes started
The rest of this video belongs to people who were there early and people who came later: a friend who had been praying in his car for the city the day Brett first told him about it, a mother who met Dream Center when volunteers knocked on apartment doors near Main Street to invite kids out to play, and a family that has volunteered for nine years. Their stories share a thread. Find a need and fill it, find a hurt and heal it, and love your neighbor where they actually are.
Over those ten years, Main Street has changed. It used to be a place people avoided. Now there is music, there are events, and children play in the park.
In Exodus 14, with the Egyptian army behind them and the Red Sea in front of them, Moses tells the people to be still, because God will fight for them. The next verse is God telling Moses to tell the people to move. We have learned to take the next step in faith and watch God put the ground under our feet. The Ambassador was where that first step began.
