What is the biggest dream that you have for your life? Maybe your dream is to be famous (a rock star, an author, or an actor). Perhaps your dream is to live a happy life (your kids are fulfilled and healthy). Some others may have a dream to make enough money to retire early.
I have moved through various dreams for my life as I have gotten older. When I was in high school, my dream was to be in politics, maybe a senator or even higher. Then, I got to college, and my dream was that I might go to broadway and be a singer in a show, like Les Miserables, or Phantom of the Opera. After college, my dream was to go into International Relations and work in a foreign embassy. Then there were the dreams to build a "mega church" like Robert Schuller or Rick Warren. Now, my dream is mostly to build a healthy church that HELPS people, and to raise a family that has internal strength and fortitude. But to be honest, most of the dreams of my life have been about ME.
Today is the 50th anniversary of the death of a man whose dream it was to live in a fully racially integrated society. A place where, "one day there in Alabama, little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers." This was the dream of one African American pastor named, of course, Martin Luther King Jr., who was shot on the porch of his hotel room in Memphis, Tennessee, on April 4, 1968.
What is remarkable about Dr. King's dream, in hindsight, is how huge and how bold and how grandiose and how large it actually was. We take for granted today that it is possible to have a president of the United States who is an African American, or to be able to go to any college you want to as long as your grades are good enough, and you have the financial means. But back in Dr. King's day, that wasn't the case. South of the Mason Dixon Line, as they say, separate bathrooms were commonplace, separate restaurants, separate stores, separate neighborhoods. America was deeply divided.
To compare the radical audacity of racial integration in the South (and North) to Dr. King's dream in 1968 would be to compare it to some of the current massive calamities that our world faces. A modern day version of Dr. King's dream might be one of the following:
"I have a dream...that one day every child on the face of the earth will not go to bed hungry at night."
"I have a dream...that one day malaria and other mosquito born illnesses, which kill millions of people around the world each year, will be eradicated."
"I have a dream...that depression and other psychological illnesses that people face, will be a thing of the past."
"I have a dream...that the United States will never again have a mass shooting ever again."
"I have a dream...that there will never again be a war that involves religious differences between people."
"I have a dream...that there will never again be a war!"
You fill in the blank....how big of a dream can you come up with?
What may be missing from the modern psyche is the ability to dream large...dream VERY large. There have been dreamers in the past. There have been the William Wilberforce's who dreamed of eradicating slavery from Great Britain. There have been the Louis Pasteur's who dreamed of, among other things, a world without rabies and anthrax. There were the founding fathers of America who dreamed of an experimental country where a democratically elected and Federalist system could actually replace a monarchical system. But where are the dreamers today?
What is the seedbed of great dreams? Courage, obviously. Altruism. Audacious, irrational optimism and tenacity. A crazy idea that is so big that you are willing to lay down your life for it.
And perhaps most of all, the dream that you might have, will be larger than your own life. That is, if you were to die, in the middle of the completion of that dream, as Dr. King did on that porch in Memphis, Tennessee, that that dream would go on, and carry forward and progress a little more day by day. And of course there is work to do. But the dream still exists. As Dr. King put it, until the day when we are...
"Free at last. Free at last. Thank God Almighty, we are free at last."
All For Now,
GB
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