This past Friday, I walked outside during one of my planning periods to get better 3G reception on my Kindle, but it was so nice out that even after I downloaded the material I wanted, instead of going back inside, I sat on a bench in front of the school and read.
The sky was bright blue and the air had a touch of autumn in it. It was so peaceful reading out there, so perfect, that I wondered why it had taken me 12 years to step outside, why it had taken me 12 years to realize that the outside world didn’t disappear when I stepped foot in my classroom.
Sometimes I’m just blind.
Sometimes I’m stubborn.
I was eighteen before I tried a strawberry, because how could anything with so many seeds be any good. Low and behold it was wonderful.
Sometimes I’m afraid.
I didn’t learn how to swim until I was sixteen.
Sometimes I wonder what all three: blindness, stubbornness and fear have kept me from all these years.
This past Tuesday at seminary, my professor made an allusion to Langston Hughes’ poem "A Dream Deferred." It’s one of my favorite poems and as soon as I heard the words “raisin in the sun,” Tuesday night, I was googling the poem, pulling it up during class.
Here are the words that move me most: “What happens to a dream deferred?/Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?/… Or does it explode?”
How many dreams have I deferred in life without even realizing it? How many dreams have I passed on the street and never made eye contact with? How many dreams have I run from? How many dreams have I thrown away because they couldn’t possibly be for me? What has happened to those dreams? Where did they go?
Of course as soon as I reread the poem the other night, I thought about the priesthood, about seminary, how not going to seminary fulltime makes me feel like I’m deferring a dream, and much like in the poem, I worry about what such a deferment will do to me, spiritually.
I’ve been thinking a lot these past few weeks about Langston Hughes and Steve Jobs. Who would have thought those two names would ever be used in the same sentence? But they were both visionaries and both hungry for what mattered in life.
Again, I go back to Steve Jobs’ Stanford speech. He says, in reference to finding work you love, “If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle.”
What is our purpose in life? It’s an important question, one posed, I’m sure, centuries and millennia before Rick Warren turned it into a book.
What is our purpose? What is it that God wants us to do with our lives? What gifts has He given us? How will we make use of those gifts? These are the great questions of anyone’s life and I would add one more to that.
I think finding our purpose in life is the easy part. It’s the joy-filled part. It’s the thing that gets us up in the morning. The hard part is fulfilling that purpose. The hard part is living the dream even when it seems the world is conspiring to tear it from our grasp.
How do we hold on?
Before the crucifixion, the disciples knew exactly what their purpose in life was. They had been fishermen, some of them, but Jesus had set them on a new path. They were followers. They went where he went. They ate what he ate. They slept where he slept.
But then Jesus died.
In his book Beautiful Outlaw, John Eldredge describes a scene from the Bible that I was unfamiliar with. It is from John 21:1-14. Jesus is dead. Seven of the disciples are out fishing when a man appears on the shore and asks them if they’ve caught anything. When they declare they haven’t, he tells them “cast the net to the right side of the boat.” Immediately, they have so many fish, they can't even haul them into the boat.
They suddenly realize that the man on the shore is Jesus and when Peter makes that realization, instead of waiting to turn the boat around and head back to shore, he jumps into the sea and starts swimming to Jesus even though they are more than a football field away.
Eldredge points out that though the Bible does not say what happened the moment Peter reached the shore, he expects that Peter and Jesus engaged in a long embrace.
I said in an earlier blog that our life journey is to seek out what God intends for us and then not to let go even when the seas get rough.
In fact, we need to be more like Peter. Peter thought he had lost the one thing he cared about more than anything else in the world, but when he found it again, he didn’t wait, he leapt in and used every bit of his will and determination to bring him to Jesus. And then he grabbed hold of Jesus and didn’t let go.
God is the one constant in our lives, the One who forever lives and loves. He is unchanging. And it is to Him that we need to reach for when our dreams seem just out of reach.
