Perspective: Damned Dreams that Don't Die

I share these thoughts hoping they are of help to someone else.

Comments are always welcomed.

If you find these thoughts helpful, please share.

Damned Dreams that Don't Die

Elisha said, "About this time next year, you will be holding a son in your arms."

But she said, "No, man of God, sir; don't lie to your servant."

2 Kings 4:16 (CEB)

There's a light and a darkened road

There's a night and a fading hope

There was a dream that once was mine

But now it seems it has passed with time

From "The Other Side" by Sirenia

Every time Elisha passed through Shunem, a certain woman in the town invited him over to her house for dinner.¹  The prophet had dined at her house so many times that she suggested to her husband that they prepare a guest room so that he would somewhere to stay as he traveled.  The next time Elisha passed through town, the woman invited him to stay in the room they had prepared for him.  As he rested, he wondered if there was anything he could do to repay the woman for her hospitality, and his assistant noticed that she and her husband had no children.

Elisha blessed the woman with the promise of a son, saying, "About this time next year, you will be holding a son in your arms."

The woman replied, "No, man of God, sir; don't lie to your servant."  I suspect that this woman had, at one time, dreamed of having a child of her own.  After years of being unable to conceive, she had apparently resigned herself to never having one.  When Elisha promised her that she would have a son, she did not believe him.  Having already grown comfortably numb to the sadness and shame of childlessness, she did want to get her hopes up and open herself up to further disappointment.

The Shunammite woman reminds me of myself.  Though the prospect of having children is nowhere on my radar at the moment, biblical stories of infertility speak to me, because there is one part of my life that has seemed utterly unfruitful.  I have a dream for my life that will likely never come true, yet the damned dream just won't stay dead.  From time to time it is revived, only to be shattered anew.  I tend to become cranky when people ask me about it.

Not long after Elisha left, the woman became pregnant, and, one year after the prophet promised she would have a son, she gave birth to a baby boy.  Her dream of having a child of her own had finally come true.

One day a few years later, the boy began complaining about a headache.  Later that day, he died on his mother's lap.

Having never had children, I do not know what the woman was feeling, but I imagine she was feeling a mixture of devastation and anger.  She was doing just fine before Elisha promised her that she would have a child.  She had already made peace with the bitter reality that she would never have a child, and, when by some act of God she finally had the child she always wanted, she had to watch him die.  Her long-dead dream was revived only to be crushed all the more cruelly.  How many times does a dream have to die before it can finally be laid to rest?

The woman laid her child's body on the bed in Elisha's guest room and then set out to visit the prophet herself.  When Elisha saw her from a distance, he sent his assistant out to meet her, but she refused to tell him anything.  When she saw the prophet, she fell to his feet and cried, "Did I ask you for a son, sir?  Didn't I say, 'Don't raise my hopes'?"  The prophet had effectively ripped open an old wound in the woman's heart and rubbed salt into it.

Elisha instructed his assistant to accompany the woman to her home and to place his staff on the child's face, but the woman refused to leave unless the prophet went with her.  Elisha agreed to go with the woman, and his assistant went ahead of them and did what he instructed, to no avail.  When Elisha arrived at the woman's house, he entered the guest room, closed the door behind him, and started praying.  He leaned over the child's body and noticed that the skin grew warm.  He paced back and forth in the room, probably praying even more fervently.  He leaned over the child's body again, and the child started sneezing.

Elisha sent for the woman and presented her child to her, alive and well.

Some dreams just won't die.  If a dream won't die, then maybe it's not quite time to give up on it.  Maybe I shouldn't give up on my hopes and dreams for my life yet.


Notes:

1. This perspective is based primarily on 2 Kings 4:8-37.  Quotations are taken from the Common English Bible.

Elisha and the Shunammite Woman was painted by Gerbrand van den Eeckhout in 1649.

Perspective: The Power of a Dream

I share these thoughts hoping they are of help to someone else.

Comments are always welcomed.

If you find these thoughts helpful, please share.

The Power of a Dream

Even though you intended to do harm to me, God intended it for good, in order to preserve a numerous people, as he is doing today.

Genesis 50:20 (NRSV)

---

We know that God works all things together for good for the ones who love God, for those who are called according to his purpose.

Romans 8:28 (CEB)

You may say that I'm a dreamer

But I'm not the only one

I hope someday you'll join us

And the world will be as one

From "Imagine" by John Lennon

Joseph was the second youngest of twelve brothers, and, as his father's favorite son, he was hated by his older brothers.  Joseph was also a dreamer.  One night, he dreamed that he and his older brothers were harvesting grain when suddenly his bundle of grain stood upright on its own while his brothers' bundles of grain bowed down to it.  Another night, he dreamed that the sun, the moon, and eleven stars bowed down to him.  One does not need to be a psychologist to understand the significance of these dreams: the family pipsqueak dreamed that he would one day be greater than the rest of his family, especially his older brothers.  When he told his older brothers about his dreams, they hated him all the more.¹

Biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann notes that the main conflict in this story is "between the dream and the 'Killers of the Dream'" and that the dream itself is "the unsettling work of [God] upon which everything else depends."²  Though Joseph was his father's favorite son, in the eyes of his older brothers, he was still basically the runt of the family, and his dreams of power were very unsettling to them.  According to Brueggemann,
The brothers are not political theorists.  But they know the threat of hope.  They are the older ones.  They have had things as they wanted them.  Against their age and power, the boy is helpless.  So he dreams.  The dream is a way of hoping for a new arrangement very different from present.  Even as a dream, such hope is a threat.  It anticipates the end of the present order.³

Sometimes, the dream of the powerless is perceived by the powerful as a threat that must be destroyed.  Brueggemann writes,
The bearer of dreams is a threat.  Those who are well off as secure older brothers prefer what is to what may come by way of dreams.  They conclude the way to deal with the dream is to kill it - kill the dreamer and thereby kill the dream.⁴

One day, Joseph was sent out to check on his older brothers, who had taken their father's flock out to pasture.  When his brothers saw him, they threw him into a pit, and when a caravan of merchants passed by on their way to Egypt, they sold him as a slave.  They covered Joseph's coat in blood, and, when they went home, they gave it to their father and told him that Joseph must have been killed by a wild animal.⁵

Years later, during a widespread famine, the ten brothers traveled to Egypt, the only country that was known to have food.  When they arrived in Egypt, they were directed to the governor, who was in charge of distributing the food that the nation had stored up in previous years.  The brothers bowed down to the governor and begged to buy some food from him.  Little did they know that they were bowing before the one who said that they would someday bow to him - the brother they sold into slavery.  Little did they know that they actually set in motion the very chain of events that caused his dreams to come true.⁶

I am reminded of another dreamer, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who dreamed not of power or grandeur but of justice.  He dreamed that one day his nation would finally live up to its own ideal, "that all men are created equal."  He dreamed that one day "the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave-owners will be able to sit down together at a table of brotherhood."  He dreamed that his own children would "one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."  He dreamed that, in areas deeply divided by prejudice, "little black boys and little black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers."⁷

King was not the only person who ever dreamed this kind of dream, nor was he the first, for his dream was of the Kingdom of God, which Christ himself came to earth to announce.  In the Kingdom of God, people are not judged or privileged based on arbitrary reasons like skin color.  In this Kingdom, to borrow some words from St. Paul, "there is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female," for all people in this Kingdom are "one in Christ Jesus."⁸  Paul could have also said that there is no longer black or white, or that there is no longer rich or poor, or that there is no longer conservative or liberal.

Like Joseph's older brothers, the privileged and the powerful saw King's dream of justice and equality as a threat, and, like Joseph's brothers, they wanted the dreamer out of the way.  King was aware of the threats against him, but he was still confident that his dream would someday come true whether or not he would be alive to see it.  He believed that "the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice."⁹  King proclaimed on the night before he was murdered,
I just want to do God's will.  And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain.  And I've looked over.  And I've seen the Promised Land.  I may not get there with you.  But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land.¹⁰

When Joseph finally revealed his identity to his brothers, he told them that God had used their actions to ultimately place him into a position of great authority in Egypt so that he could save the lives of many people during the famine.¹¹  His recurring dream had been a sign from God.  Though his brothers tried to destroy him and his God-given dream, they actually set the wheels in motion to make his dream to come true.  After all, he ended up in Egypt because they sold him to merchants who were headed there.

God is actively working to redeem and restore a broken world, and one way that God bring us into this redemptive work is by giving us dreams.  I believe that dreams like that of Martin Luther King Jr. are no less God-given than that of Joseph.  God-given dreams are not easily killed, and the story of Joseph shows us that God can even use the very actions meant to destroy people's God-given dreams to make the same dreams become realities.  That said, people like white supremacists who fight against God-given dreams of equality and justice should beware, for their own actions just might ultimately prove to be their own undoing.  God has a mysterious way of bending people's hateful and destructive actions so that they actually work toward God's redemptive purposes.

"True peace is not the absence of tension; it is
the presence of Justice." ~ Martin Luther King Jr.

Notes:

1. Genesis 37:1-11
2. Walter Brueggemann.  Genesis (Interpretation: A Bible Commentary for Teaching and Preaching).  2010, John Knox Press.  loc. 6008, 6010  (Location numbers from the Amazon Kindle version are displayed for this source since physical page numbers were not available to me.  All references can be found in the section of the commentary covering Genesis 37:1-36.)
3. Brueggemann, loc. 6086
4. Brueggemann, loc. 6112
5. Genesis 37:12-36
6. Genesis 42:1-9a
7. Quotations were taken from King's "I Have a Dream" speech.
8. Galatians 3:28 (NRSV)
9. This quote is King's paraphrase of a quote by minister and activist Theodore Parker.
10. This quotation was taken from King's "I've Been to the Mountaintop" speech.
11. Genesis 45:4-8

The photograph featured above was taken by me last year at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial in Washington D.C.