Dawn-guns

I want to make full disclosure, before you read what I have written below.  Because, I stand convicted by all the stress my dreams have imposed on my normal peace of mind.  After waking from the dream, my mind began to make sense.  

Some of what I thought wasn’t too awfully pleasant to think about. The truth is, I quite easily cave-in to the temptation to the very thing I loath.  And of late my sleeping brain is yelling in resistance to it all.  

                                                            

End of my personal confession.

I woke up this morning in a less then pleasant mood.  I had another one of those irritating dreams about people’s  need to be right.  This time it had to do with, the fast approaching, presidential election.  

In the dream I had an old familiar feeling of being stupid, uninformed and inadequate to decide for myself.  All I knew was that I was appalled by the way people treated others — me included in the ‘others’ — and I woke up totally disgruntled. 

What was bothering me was the way people feel free to speak rudely to, or of, others who don’t agree with them.

I lay there for a while trying to decipher what was really bothering me.  Why the grabbiness?  Life is so extraordinarily good these days.  When the passage, where Jesus talks about things that come out of our mouths, popped into my mind:

10 Then he called the crowd to him and said to them, ‘Listen and understand: ¹¹it is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a person, but it is what comes out of the mouth that defiles.’ ¹²Then the disciples approached and said to him, ‘Do you know that the Pharisees took offence when they heard what you said?’ ¹³He answered, ‘Every plant that my heavenly Father has not planted will be uprooted. ¹⁴Let them alone; they are blind guides of the blind. And if one blind person guides another, both will fall into a pit.’ ¹⁵But Peter said to him, ‘Explain this parable to us.’ ¹⁶Then he said, ‘Are you also still without understanding? ¹⁷Do you not see that whatever goes into the mouth enters the stomach, and goes out into the sewer? ¹⁸But what comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart, and this is what defiles. ¹⁹For out of the heart come evil intentions, murder, adultery, fornication, theft, false witness, slander. ²⁰These are what defile a person, but to eat with unwashed hands does not defile.’(Mt.15) 

Pretty powerful analogy don’t you think?

So, keeping myself quiet ,I began to formulate what such dreams were saying to me.  This is what I came up with:

“It seem to me that in every area of human life there is a need to take sides.  

 

Political parties

Religious Affiliation

        Sports team loyalty

            School ground play

                Teen-age status groups

                    Grown-ups status groups

                        Intellectual guidelines levels

                            Levels of education

Sexual preference

                                  My skill vs your skill

                                      My opinion vs your opinion

And yes, even Apple or PC debates that apparently represent left and right thinking.

Or the make of car you drive.

Or theological debates on how people view God’s Word; or believe in God or not believe.

And it seems that there is this ugly divide that somehow just naturally takes place between the various groups of people.  And people get pushy, and rude and arrogant and just plain not nice to be around.”

I was trying to imagine how we could eliminate such a poison habit. I began to think about ways to clean up the messy ingredient in the human character.  

I laughed at my thought:  

“Dawn guns.”  

The dish soap, dawn, easily cleans of grease, and all sorts of slimy things off dishes, pans and even animal.  They use it to clean oil off birds and animal as a result of large oil spills. 

Maybe it would work on people’s tongues.

Dawn guns instead of water-gun or real-live-bullet-guns.

Just an early morning hazing crazy thought.