Beyond Your Wildest Dreams!

We hear it often, but how wild are your dreams?

If they’re anything like mine, they can be quite scary ... more of a nightmare. Several times I’ve dreamed that I was with someone who figured prominently in my past.  I’ve been quite sure who she was even though, considered independently, neither her face nor the style and colour of her hair match those of historic fact.  Whatever it was that made me so positive about her identity is lost in the depths of sleep but I have no doubt that, when that dream returns, I shall be just as certain that it’s the same person.

Some say that dreams are heavenly messages, like those we read of in the Bible that often feature the appearance of angels.  While I wouldn’t discount this possibility, it’s my understanding that most of our dreams are simply a random accumulation of snippets from a variety of episodes in our lives - both recent and long ago - that the resting brain somehow allows to drift to the surface.  If there is any coherence or apparent story to these, as likely as not it's woven by our wakeful minds around those particular aspects of the dream that we remember at the moment of waking.

An endless store of human experience is to be found in the Psalms.  I’m drawing on two particular extracts here.  “How many are your works, O LORD! In wisdom you made them all; the earth is full of your creatures” (Ps. 104:24).  Succeeding verses tell of God’s creation of animals, the sun and moon, and living things swimming in the seas; I like playing with words and this verse reminds me that the earth, and all that fills it, is God’s creation.

Another psalm asks, “Where can I go from your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence? If I go up to the heavens, you are there; if I make my bed in the depths, you are there” (Ps. 139:7-8).  God is all-embracing; He is everywhere.  Even if sometimes we don’t acknowledge it, we can’t avoid being in His presence.

It’s usually at the times when we don’t give a thought to God, and His desire to be involved in our lives, that things go wrong.  We make wrong decisions, follow bad advice, and so on.  The hymn What a friend we have in Jesus, which includes the line ‘take it to the Lord in prayer’, is usually sung to the tune ‘Converse’.  So, conversely, if we bring our needs to Him in prayer, He will provide for them in whatever way is for our greatest good.

Back to dreams, then: the whole of life’s experience, stored away in our memory, is available to our sleeping minds.  From this rich store come the components that make up our dreams.  Similarly, the whole of our life is God’s creation and subject to His influence if only we will allow it.

Next time you wake up with a dream still in your mind, try to think beyond its content, however wild, and remember the greatness of God’s place in your life.

Loving and Liking

If you’re anything like me, there are many people in this world, in your town - possibly in your own street - that you don’t like.  Maybe they have a bad reputation, perhaps you’ve seen them behaving badly, or you might even dislike something about them that you would never refer to in public, such as their race or sexual orientation!

We are conditioned to think of liking as a mild form of loving.  Let’s begin in the dictionary, where we find “like: verb, find agreeable or enjoyable or satisfactory; choose to have, prefer.” “love: verb, feel deep fondness for; delight in, admire, greatly cherish.”  So, there is some justification for that view of one being a  more intense form of the other.  But ...

In the Gospels, ‘love’ is found with either ‘God’ or ‘Jesus’ some 40 times.  Only twice is this not in the context of love either by or for the Divine; these are in the two accounts of the parable of the servant who had two masters and ‘loved the other’ (Matt. 6:24, Luke 16:13).  Substitute ‘like’ for ‘love’, and the number of incidences is halved but, more significantly, all but one of these is descriptive, e.g, ‘like a child’, ‘like a dove’ and so on.  The only exception is ‘sir, we would like to see Jesus’ (John 12:21).  None of the Biblical examples shows ‘like’ as an emotion between two people.

I feel justified, therefore, in claiming that the emotion to which Scripture exhorts us is to love, and it is the same love that God has for mankind ... all of mankind.  Liking is altogether different, and I’d say that the dictionary’s definition of finding something agreeable is not far from the mark.  If we look at some of the folks with whom we share our living space and find them ‘not agreeable or enjoyable’ because of how they look or smell, or what they do, then that’s no more than a matter of preference.  It’s part of our God-given individuality that we enjoy some things and not others. 

What is important is how we treat them.  Jesus tells us to ‘love one another ... as I have loved you’ (John 13:34), and the issue is really how we express that love.  The challenge is to treat those we don’t like the same as we treat those that we do, and whose company we do enjoy.  If we do things for our friends, smile at them and joke with them, we should be no less willing to treat that refugee family or the smelly tramp on the street corner in exactly the same way.

Next time you see one of those people you don’t like ... you don’t have to feel guilty about not liking them.  But remember that God loves them, and ask how you can express to them that duty of love.