Dr. Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech, delivered at the March on Washington, August 28, 1963, is one of the most important and well known speeches in history.  Far less known, however, is that the actual speech he had before him on the podium that day had no mention of a dream whatsoever. 

For years, Dr. King had been writing and speaking about his dream.  He dreamed that one day racial oppression would no longer threaten the American creed that all of humanity is created equal.  He dreamed that every man, woman, and child would be seen as an heir to the legacy of worthiness, and he dreamed that the American people would learn to cultivate this worthy perspective.  He spoke so often of having a dream, in fact, that his inner circle was afraid the phrase had become overused and trite.  The night before the March on Washington, Dr. King and his closest advisors worked together to come up with an entirely new message.  "I have a dream" did not appear in the manuscript at all.

The speech was titled "Normalcy—Never Again" and before a quarter of a million hearers the following day King began to outline the troublesome history of black men and women in America.  But several minutes into this speech he paused and he turned the manuscript over.  And then he launched into the words that were closest to his heart: "So I say to you today, my friends, that even though we must face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream." 

I am not sure how often the world is changed by a revision. But this one I cannot imagine the world without.  The apostle Paul writes of seeing the kingdom of heaven as if through a glass darkly.  From a bird's eye view of this split decision in history, it seems for a moment that the glass was partly cleared.  Dr. King's decision to talk about the dream God had given him is wrought with the vision and wisdom of God.  It brings me to ask: How do I learn to live with such a sensitivity to the Holy Spirit that I could completely shift gears against the advice of the experts and before a crowd of 250,000 onlookers?  But it also brings me to wonder at the God who is near us in the making of history, the God who makes all things new.

The Scriptures speak of God as the eternal weaver of time and meaning.  God is the voice that spoke the world out of chaos and into abundance, the breath that blew the church out of despair into existence, and the spirit that makes things new that never were.  In the fullness of time, the eternal comes near and we are forever changed.  Paul recounts, "But when the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, in order to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as children" (Galatians 4:4-5).

Dr. King may have launched that day into an old and tired message, but it was a message somehow made new within a world that desperately needed to hear it.  Clarence Jones, one of the men who had helped with the new speech the night before, recalled the transition in King's speech, and remembered bowing his head in defeat of all the work they had put into preparing a new message.  Little did he realize what could become of four familiar words when the Spirit is moving and active.  "I have a dream" became the phrase that came to define the civil rights movement itself, and inspired the people of God to look again at the counter-cultural nature of God's kingdom among us.

The Holy Spirit that guides us is the one who moved David from shepherd to king, the one Jesus promised his disciples on the night he went from beloved to despised.  Jesus assured them that he would not leave them as orphans, and though it looked bleak from the view of the Calvary, he kept his promise.  The Spirit of God is near, making all things new, moving change into our world, bringing life into deadened consciences, whispering to us in time that one day our tears will be no more and the old order of things will pass away.  God is the keeper of this, the greatest of dreams, and of the dreamers themselves.

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.