Dreams can be funny things. I mean while-you-sleep dreams, not the goals/wishes/aspirations kind of dreams. Once I had a dream where part of it came true. Twice I've had dreams where I was singing and I remembered part of the song when I woke up (and each time ended up writing the rest of the song to go with it). Last night I had some strange dreams, but when I woke up this morning I was only thinking about one of them.
It was about a prison camp. For some reason they had statues and beautiful works of art there, things that people would pay a lot of money to own or even to view in a museum. But the thought that I woke with was this: the people there were still in a prison camp.
In that twilight of thought where I wasn't quite asleep and I wasn't fully awake, I started to explore that idea.
What I felt instinctively was that, like our world, the prison camp had some really neat and interesting stuff in it. But there was so much more outside the fences of the camp: a bigger world, a freer world, a more beautiful world.
I imagined people picking up rocks from the gravel pathways, collecting them, becoming absorbed in them and not noticing when the liberators tore down the walls to free the prisoners. So many people, even Christians, are completely wrapped up in the making of money and acquisition of STUFF, as worthless in God's eyes as gravel. They have great collections, but they're still living in the prison camp of this world, abiding by its rules, slave to its whims.
That's as far as I got before the alarm disturbed my thoughts and jerked me all the way into reality as I whacked the clock, vainly trying to find the snooze button.
Now, obviously, I don't think making money is bad. I don't think having stuff is bad. But when lifestyle choices mean we have to work extra hours to pay for things we don't really need, we are moving our priorities away from Biblical priorities, choosing to follow the world's prison rules instead of God's. God puts a huge priority on people. Not stuff.
It's not just people with lots of money that can stay trapped in the prison camp collecting gravel instead of enjoying the beauty and freedom outside. Folks without much money (even Christians!) tend to think that having more money and more stuff would make life easier, and therefore, better. Maybe that's partially true. But this group can start coveting the gravel that others are piling up for themselves, and feel deprived and discontent because they can't have as much gravel as someone else. Or, which is just as bad, start to say, "Ok, God, look at how wonderful I am for trying to be content with what I have! I'd better be racking up the brownie points!" They, too, are living by the prison camp rules instead of God's.
Here in the States we have so much. We who are students or struggling because of other reasons may think we're poor, but we have more gravel than most of the world can afford. But maybe that's a good way of thinking of it: gravel.
Uh-oh, now I have an idea. And I'm going to try it. When I see some stuff I want, I will try to go one step farther than "can I afford it?" to "is this something I need or is this gravel? Do I want it because the prison guard (aka Everyone Else) says so?"
Jesus purchased our freedom, tore down the walls of the prison camp, and showed us the way out, but we still choose whether or not to live inside or outside.
Where will you live?
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