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Do Dreams Come True

John Paul Lederach: Do dreams ever come true? Time is a strange fellow, seen better back than

forward. We measure our worth by his passing, the blocks of things we do.

In early years, he's an hour or two, like taking a nap or playtime. By school, he's four years like high

school or college. Then come the job years and without even a notice, we judge him in decades.

And grandparents? Ah. Grandparents measure time by families and generations.

People say that youth and idealism go together, that somewhere around the first and second job,

we move [01:00] from ideal to real. Those little voices and dreams inside are given a seat, put on

hold, told politely, "This is not your time." Then time passes by our dreams. Or does he? As a poet

once said, "Dreams and weeds when cut and dimmed, just drop seeds that rise again."

Do you dream? Do dreams ever come true?

Herm Weaver: [singing]

Dreams that burning in the soul

They moved the seeker from home

To travel the roads alone

They move the timid to try

To just try

To take to the sky

You know, deep down inside

That we're all yearning to fly

We're all yearning to fly.

John Paul Lederach: So a couple of weeks ago, I'm at the post office downtown. Sending a book on

peacebuilding to my Afro-Colombian colleague in Bogotá. It feels like bad timing. Negotiations

have just broken off and violence is exploding everywhere at a place where you think, [03:00]

There couldn't possibly be any more violence they could do.

"Colombia!" A postal worker looks at the address.

I nod.

"Man that's a nasty place."

I nod again.

During my visit only a few weeks earlier, one of the priests from an area controlled by the

paramilitaries had commented to me, "We have our dreams, you know? But they just are kept in

check by our daily decisions, like what blessing to say at a funeral mass for an assassinated

campesina mother with three of her children listening to your every word."

Lost in these thoughts, I leave the counter when a face in the new stamps display catches my eye. I

move closer for a look. On the [04:00] crisp new sheet are twenty-five identical, 34 cent

miniatures of a familiar face smiling right back at me.

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The story is told by an English professor who was teaching at Lincoln University in 1927 that one

day in class he was making a wonderful but apparently terribly boring lecture because right there

in class sat a young man who was scribbling wildly on the margins of his literature book, oblivious

to absolutely everything the professor was saying. At the end of the period, he called that young

man to his desk.

"Show me what you were writing," he demanded, expecting to pin the fellow down.

Without a word, the young man opened his book and laid it on his professor's desk, who then read

out loud:

Hold fast to dreams

For if dreams die

Life is a broken-winged bird

That cannot fly.

Hold fast to dreams

For when dreams go

Life is a barren field

All covered with snow.

The professor said not a word. He closed the book and looked up into the eyes of what he thought

was a young, bored student, but that he now knew was the poet James Mercer Langston Hughes.

"The Dream Keeper," I mutter to myself, looking at the stamps for a long time, his brown tweed

coat, dipped felt hat, mustache, thin face. It must have been the '40s, or maybe the '50s, I think.

That poem he scribbled in an English book became a classic. [06:00] But did the dreams of a young

poet ever come true?

Thirty years after he penned it, the last line of his poem "Dream Variation" became the title of a

book Black Like Me, that of "Dream Deferred" became a movie, "Raisin in the Sun," and his call to

hold fast to dreams inspired a young Baptist preacher to walk from Alabama to Washington,

where on the steps of our Capitol to the thousands gathered he said, "I have a dream that my four

children will 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." And that speech changed our nation forever.

On the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, where [07:00] Martin Luther King,

Jr., was assassinated, there is a small plaque that carries a verse from Genesis, where Joseph's

brothers plotted to get rid of him. It reads, "Here comes the dreamer. Come now, let us kill him

and we shall see what will become of his dreams.”

I turn around and get back in line.

"Forgot your stamps?" postal worker jokes.

"Yes," I answer. "Please give me four sheets of the Dream Keeper.

"Uh, I'm not sure which one that is," he says.

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"Four of Langston Hughes, the Dream Keeper. I'm going to frame two for my children. And I'm

going to save two for my great grandchildren." [08:00]

As I leave the post office, I think to myself, Maybe there is hope for Colombia.

And now we look out into your eyes, the eyes that see the potential and the possibility. We look to

your hands, the hands that hold the promise. We look to your hearts, where dreams reside. Please

let them burst forth. Like the invisible wings of an angel, let them fly. For there is no greater gift to

the world that you can give than to listen carefully to what God has placed in your heart and to be

true to what you hear.

Lederach, John Paul, and Herm Weaver. Do Dreams Come True. Stories & Songs for the Road, Live at the Guild, 2002.