Circle of Hope

Have you ever experienced that period right before you wake up, where you’re dreaming but really half awake? During this time I typically come up with all sorts of revolutionary ideas and inventions. For example, the other morning I invented a machine that cleans your shoes right before you walk into the house so that your girlfriend and your mom can’t yell at you anymore for tracking in mud. A while back, I dreamed that it would be a good idea for the military to have missiles that drop food aid into villages, instead of explosives that kill everyone. This morning in my dream I gave up my apartment and went to live with the homeless person who spends most of his time in the median outside of the Wal-Mart on Columbus Blvd. We marched into Washington DC together and convinced Congress to pave the way for every city to have more affordable housing. I typically come up with all sorts of inventions and great ways to go about social action in these times, only to wake up a few minutes later and think that the ideas are actually pretty impractical (moms would never allow the shoe cleaning thing to take off, missiles are a lot more efficient when they are being used to kill people, and living on the street just isn’t realistic. I’m pretty white and I might get sunburned out there….right??).

I think my right brain overpowers my left brain when I’m asleep. Then when I wake up my left brain kicks back in, if only to tell me that my dreams aren’t realistic (or maybe my brain science is horrible and that’s not what happens at all). Either way, I don’t remember this being a problem when I was a kid. I want to be more like that again, to dream and actually think things are possible.

I have been thinking a lot lately about how much imagination it takes to follow Jesus. The Gospel doesn’t really place a lot of value on being practical. I think Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. captured how difficult this is when he said, “We are called to play the Good Samaritan on life’s roadside…but one day we must come to see that the whole Jericho road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that a system that produces beggars needs to be repaved. We are called to be a Good Samaritan, but after you lift so many people out of the ditch you start to ask, maybe the whole road to Jericho needs to be repaved.” I think it takes a lot of imagination to see how our little community is working to repave the entire road to Jericho. It’s really much too long a road. We can’t do it unless we allow Jesus keep our dreams from being devoured by our reason.