Categories: uncategorized
Date: 11 August 2010 10:08:02
I started struggling with struggling It was a strange week. I was stuck, spending every waking and sleeping hour of 7 long days, with a bunch of young charismatics. Amongst many things I learnt the reality of "your old men will dream dreams, your young men will see visions". I used to think that this was Hebrew poetic style, and the use of the two words "dreams" and "visions" was just meant to be two descriptions of essentially the same phenomenon, and that there was not some key distinction being made between the two. That week I learnt the fallacy of this view. I discovered that when your young earnest evangelical dreams, he takes it to be a vision, that everyone around him must be told about, because God has spoken to him, him alone, and clearly God thinks he's special and has given him this special message for everyone. On the other hand, when the old man dreams, he has learnt enough wisdom to realize that it is a dream and nothing more. One of the young men that week dreamt about struggling. He was striving to do something and never achieved it. This was clearly a vision from God that he shouldn't strive and, since God had given this vision so clearly to him in such a personal way, it was obviously a message that he was duty-bound to pass on to everyone, to tell them that they shouldn't strive. They should let go and let God. (Well, to be fair, he didn't mention that cliché, but only, I'm sure, because he hadn't heard it yet). I suppose that episode falls into the category of things I was describing before - erroneous assertions accepted unquestioningly. For years I've been turning over in my head how to "rise above the gutter you are inside" without striving. If struggling to do better is wrong, then I have to lie back and accept how crap I am and just wait for this to change. That sounds attractive, and I could easily see myself acting despicably while explaining that's it not my fault, I'm just waiting to be improved to a less despicable state. Unfortunately even I am not stupid enough to think that this is the right approach to life. So, to struggle, or not to struggle, that is the question I'm left struggling with.