We are in the graduation season. For the next two months, many dreamers will move one more step closer to reaching their dreams—a degree, a career, an aspiration. Speakers will extol the value and virtue of reaching a dream. But will that dream be a dream or a dream deferred. Poet Langston Hughes speaks to that distinction:
What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore—
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over—
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?
As Hughes so eloquently painted, not all dreams are created equal. Some are explosive, expansive; some are corrosive, rotten. “Dynamite” dreams clear the path for your purpose and also the aspirations others. If your dream doesn’t inspire and expand another person, your success is nothing more than a raisin in the sun—sweet, self-serving, but not as savory and satiable as having a hand in someone’s soaring.
What Hughes speaks of, God has already spoken about, of dynamic and benevolent dreams that buoy God-inspired, servant-led ambitions like that of Joseph—the technicolor dreamer. God painted him a dream on two canvases.
6 He said to them, “Listen to this dream I had: 7 We were binding sheaves of grain out in the field when suddenly my sheaf rose and stood upright, while your sheaves gathered around mine and bowed down to it.” Gen. 37:6-7
9 Then he had another dream, and he told it to his brothers. “Listen,” he said, “I had another dream, and this time the sun and moon and eleven stars were bowing down to me.” Gen. 37:9
The sheaves and stars were one and the same dream in meaning: Joseph’s eleven brothers of their father Jacob (Israel) would bow down to him someday. He would be their ruler. This God-directed, inverted arrangement of authority’s purpose would be revealed at the appropriate time.
Joseph’s dreams were not without obstacles. Dreams un-deferred are never unopposed. Out of jealousy, Joseph’s brothers rejected the dreams and sought to kill the dreamer. Their murderous plot was averted by a last-minute twinge of expedient guilt. The brothers sold their brother into slavery. As faith over fate would have it, Joseph survived a pit, an unjust prosecution, and prison in Egypt, to become vice-president of food distribution in a time of famine. Here comes the explosion.
This famine touched his family back home. The brothers went, unknowingly, before Joseph and bowed before him just as his prophetic dream had forecast thirteen years earlier. At this reunion, Joseph revealed himself and God’s purpose in his dream—to save his family and protect the Sovereign covenant between God and Abraham as seen in dream of Jacob’s Ladder (Gen. 28:12-14):
and thy seed shall be as the dust of the earth…, and in thee and in thy seed shall all the families of the earth be blessed. Gen. 28:14
20"As for you, you meant evil against me, [but] God meant it for good in order to bring about this present result, to preserve many people alive. Gen. 50:20
Joseph’s dream was an instrument in the fulfilment of his fathers’ dream to possess a promise land for his progeny, and a perpetual prosperity to bless others. One dream an ally of someone else’s--that is living an explosive, un-deferred dream. In small ways and large, this kind of dreaming blesses others as well as self. I witnessed it first hand in the life of Jeffrey. I met him at the inner-city, elementary school where I subbed. By most accounts, he, undeservedly, had the reputation as a trouble-maker, silly. So, they dumped him in my drama class. I saw him differently. He wasn’t a bad kid, just a kid who didn’t know how to dream big. “Jeffrey, you are a winner. You just have to believe it.” So, I challenged him to enter the school’s oratorical contest. I gave him the one poem with the one message I knew he needed: Langston Hughes’ A Dream Deferred. “But we’ve got work to do. Learn this. Meet me every day after school. And stay out of the principal’s office.” He did.
On the day of reckoning, he mounted the stage. His classmates giggled, expecting the old Jeffrey. Then he opened his mouth without deferral. “What happens when to a dream deferred.” He embraced every word as eternal; every truth, his own. And on the last line, “Does it explode?” he exploded like rock blasted from the side of some ancient mountain, freeing veins of priceless confidence like radiant gold and hardened diamond. With raised fist, he leapt two feet off the ground. This was no small feat for a boy’s solid 175 pounds body—a lot of gravity for a third grader. And when he landed, the earth shook; his world shook some things free; the school assembly exploded with a glory like stars spoken into being.
That day, a dream exploded. It’s ripples still traverse eternity for the good. I was saddened to hear that Jeffry passed this month, a young man who made something of himself before leaving much to soon. But my heart is gladden to have been a part of his dream un-deferred, however brief. As you sit at a graduation ceremony, celebrating a dream, ask yourself: Is my dream inextricable linked to someone else’s dream exploding. If not, make making someone else’s dreams come true part of your dream.
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