Dreams and Stuff

Sometimes, dreams can be funny things. Sometimes, they deliver messages that we really need to hear or, as the case may be, read. I don't remember much about the context of this one, save that I was trying to help out a friend by cleaning her house for her. During one part of this dream, I was looking at the door of the refrigerator, and was reading two bumper sticker style magnets that were stuck there. The first read, "Help me to harm not those who would harm me" and the second read, "Be merciful to those who colour me a..." I didn't get to finish the last one because I woke up.

I was pondering these statements on the car ride to work when the completion of the second statement popped into my head: "Be merciful to those who colour me a villain and to those whom I colour a villain myself." Pretty weighty stuff there. It brought me back to a verse in Matthew: "You have heard it said that you should love your neighbor and hate your enemy, but I say to you love your enemy..." And I thought that maybe the dream was a response to my conflicting feelings over Osama bin Laden's death. On the one hand, I am glad that it is over and that those who lost loved ones in the 9/11 attacks can get some closure, but I feel very weird about celebrating his death... or any death for that matter.

If we really are to love our enemies, then so too must we love him, regardless of what he has done. We color him a villain, and yet, there are those who at the same time color him a hero. It makes me wonder if we humans really know the difference between good and evil at all, or if we're just muddling through thinking that we do.

Maybe that was the snake's great deception: that in eating the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, we would believe that we know the difference when really we wouldn't. Perhaps, that's why we were forbidden to eat it: not because God was afraid that we would be on equal footing with Him, but because He knew that in having knowledge that we weren't ready for and therefore didn't understand, we wouldn't be able to apply it properly.

Falx

*Quick note: The spelling of colour in the second statement in the dream was how it appeared in the dream. I'm not sure why the British spelling was used and I'm not sure if it's significant.