I have a Dream meets I have a Plan

There’s an interesting dialectic in our country lately. President-elect Barack Obama will be sworn into office on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day weekend, a testimony to the inexact but inexorable march of history in the miracle called America: An African-American man, placing his hand on the Bible to take the oath of office as our President and Commander in Chief, affirming his loyalty not only to his country and its laws, but to his Lord (by his insistence, over protests, to add the words ‘so help me God’ to the official oath.) A genetic heir of both middle-American Kansas and east-African Kenya, it’s going to be cool for us in the North American heartland to watch this historic, world-entrancing moment. For MLK, the Christian dreamer and prophet who shared his dream for America and the Kingdom of God, and who might well be alive if not for an assassin’s bullet, this Inauguration would have seemed impossible. For his adversaries, it would have seemed laughable. For all of us who get to see it--regardless of our politics-- it’ll be powerful indeed.

But goosebumps don’t put bread on the table, fix our dependence on foreign adversaries for oil, or stop the cascade of home foreclosures and bank failures that have put companies out of business and our families on such shaky footing. No, the emotional legacy of January 20 will only last so long, and if President Obama can’t get our nation out of the deepest economic crisis since the Great Depression, it’ll probably be his only Inauguration Day. So with the historians and commentators correctly celebrating the coolness factor of a black family moving into the long-white White House (the Tuskegee Airmen corps members, as well his Kenyan grandmother, will all be there), there’s been a parallel eagerness about what his team’s policies and plans are going to be. General approval for his initial steps from both Republicans and Democrats has helped boost confidence that Obama will largely ‘govern from the center’—and with that position, that he will be successful in stewarding the economy in a way that more ideological policies seldom have been. But the proof’ll be in the pudding, and after history gets made, it’s back to economics class. Dreams are good, but they don't get fulfilled without plans.

The same dialectic of dreams and plans are part of our Christian walk, too. When I first claimed Christ and the promise of my Christian baptism years before, I was full of dreams: I knew some Spanish, so I wanted to work in the barrios of Chicago with Mexican immigrants. I liked science and law, so I wanted to become a Jesus-freak environmental lawyer (or a more button-downed chemical patent lawyer—it depended on the day). I knew a lot of German, too, so I wanted to study theology with some of the great professors in Germany and Switzerland. I also knew campfires and dodgeball, and how to make fun bulletin boards, so I wanted to be a youth pastor. And so on and so forth.

I had a lot of dreams as a young Christian man, but it wasn’t until God prompted me, through the invitation, role-modeling, and guidance of mentors in the church, that I developed a plan for serving Christ with my life in a practical way. That plan, to become a church planter, led me to build a team to plant first one great church, and here at Kaw Prairie, a second and hopefully final one (I’m advocating for a 2-church limit on my church planting career!) In so doing, I sat under the teaching of lots of better pastors, wiser colleagues, and challenging and different perspectives. I changed my prayer priorities, re-read the Bible with new eyes, honed my pastoral leadership style, and, not inconsequentially, dedicated my financial resources to God’s work at whole ‘nother level.

I hope you’ll either watch the Inauguration next Tuesday—live or recorded, TV or online. It’s a historic moment, one in which MLK's same America chose a President whose skin color was the same as the slaves who for generations served his White House predecessors. And it’s a historic choice by Americans who chose him, in large part, for “the content of his character,” not the color of his skin. So as we watch Martin Luther King Jr’s “I have a dream” speech get radically fulfilled on our incredible American soil, I pray that you’ll ask God whether He has a dream for you… and whether you have a plan to get where He wants you to be!