“Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but a longing fulfilled is a tree of life.”

-Proverbs 13:12 NIV

Much of our lives concerns the negotiation of hope.

The Oxford Languages dictionary describes hope as “a feeling of expectation and desire for a certain thing to happen.”

Even under the most benign circumstances, most change doesn’t happen instantly, so we wait. And while we wait, we can begin to doubt that our dreams will ever come to pass.

Furthermore, most of life doesn’t happen under benign circumstances.

We face adversity and setbacks.

We endure unthinkable loss and unexpected pain.

We can easily flag in our hope.

For this reason, the call to persevere is often a call to hope.

At the 1988 Democratic Convention, the Reverend Jesse Jackson urged his listeners to “keep hope alive.”

At the 2004 Democratic Convention, then-Senator Barack Obama spoke of “the audacity of hope.”

In his poem “Harlem”, American poet and civil rights activist Langston Hughes meditated on this scripture against the backdrop of the black struggle in America with the question “what happens to a dream deferred?”

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up

like a raisin in the sun?,

Or fester like a sore—

And then run?

Does it stink like rotten meat?

Or crust and sugar over—

like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags

like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

Hughes’s imagery explores a range of possibilities. Our hope can wither, become infected, rot and stink, harden and become unconsumable, become a weight too heavy to bear, or erupt into something altogether different.

And while Hughes’s questions are, in one sense, specific to a people and a time, and larger than the scope of this reflection, they are, in another, ones we must all confront.

Our deferred dreams wither our souls. They rob of us the juice of life.

They infect our thinking. We become cynical and encourage others to do likewise. We teach failure as if it were wisdom. We preach the gospel of not trying.

They harden our hearts. In trying to block the pain of disappointment, we end up blocking our ability to feel altogether. We become numb.

They burden our lives. We buckle under the weight of carrying things we were supposed to birth, weights we were supposed to release once we delivered them to their destination.

They explode into our world. We are a people enraged, sometimes at everything, and sometimes at nothing in particular. We road rage and keyboard rage. We kill each other in cities and suburbs, in schools, and churches, at concerts, and shopping malls. We legislate to harm. We want someone to pay for the pain we experience, because it doesn’t seem fair.

Life isn’t fair.

God is good, but people do terrible things.

And we can’t control other people’s choices.

We can, however, control our own.

Heart Disease is a modern epidemic. Some of us may have genetic predispositions. We cannot control our origins. Our diet, and our lifestyle, however, lead to trouble. We eat terrible things and don’t move in the ways we should.

The same is true in the spirit. Heart sickness is epidemic. And there are things in both our DNA, and life circumstances that may predispose us to despair. The question is what are we taking in, and how are we moving?

The proverb speaks to one remedy to our heart sickness: answered prayer – a realized goal. This is “a tree of life.” In the Garden of Eden, The Tree of Life was the source of immortality. Elsewhere in the scriptures, trees of life are sources of vitality. They nourish and revive us.

The question is, are there other remedies?

Can we hold to a promise, by faith, even when nothing has manifested for us?

Hebrews 11 features a “Hall of Faith” of men and women who believed, and persisted, but never saw the fulfillment of the promise. From Abel and Abraham, to Jacob and Joseph, to Sarah and Rahab. they remained faithful till the end and died still believing.

History, likewise, brims with the lives of people who believed for something they never saw. As Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. prophetically said, less than 24 hours before his death “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.”

I don’t know what your gifts are.

I don’t know what calls ring in your heart; I don’t know which ones you’ve answered.

I believe, however, that if you’re on this Earth, you are here for a reason.

And my prayer for you is that you find that reason and chase it with everything you’ve got.

In the words of Steven Tyler, dream on.

(Photo Credit: Karyme Franca)