We both had dreams, they answered, but there is no one to interpret them. Then Joseph said to them, Do not interpretations belong to God? Tell me your dreams. – Genesis 40:8 The cupbearer and the baker were in jail for reasons they couldn’t even conceive– it was the predicament life threw them in. Now while they were in prison, and they both had dreams that couldn’t be explained given their current situation. If it were me, I might have brushed it off as bad prison food, but they knew that there was something more to it than that. No, this is not a post about the magical fortune telling abilities of your subconscious on the alternative reality you always wanted to live in. Nor is it a post rationalizing your all too realistic “Inception” experience that has it’s roots in the supreme pizza and chicken wings you ate at 1AM. Don’t get me wrong, God can speak to you through your dreams, but a lot of times, we confuse God to be equivalent to the bad can of tuna we ate that gave our dreams a psychedelic trip. Don’t let this post minimize how God speaks to you, but instead, let this post open you up to the possibility of our deepest desires and longings of our heart to be in direction opposition to where God wants you to be. We all have notions about ourselves and we all have idealizations of who we are, but unfortunately this is never quite enough understand where and what that means in the long run, nor does it ever give us the efficacy to act in the present. Then what we experience as a result of this is stagnation, imprisonment, and what Dante called purgatory, where nothing happens except an infinite loop taking us on a Merry-Go-Round ride, up and down to nowhere. This is mostly self-inflicted and the petrifying nature of being “stuck” somewhere we don’t want to be makes us irrational and hopeless. So what do we do? We go and buy new shoes or we go and buy a car or we go on vacation or start binge drinking or snorting coke. Maybe you’re not that extreme, but perhaps you start looking for a new relationship, maybe with a somebody from the opposite sex that has similar characteristics as one of your parents, a savior that will spring you from prison. If you are that person right now, who is sitting down reading this entry and wondering why you are in a prison; ask yourself, “have I consulted God?” I bet you haven’t. In fact, you probably tried every diversion except to ask the very God who seemingly is complicit in your imprisonment. Your dreams and your current situation in life may be confounding you and burning holes in your stomach ulcers could never cause on their own; however senseless that may seem, it could be a sign for you to open yourself to a new interpretation of what your heart desires. Interpretations of your life belong to God, so tell Him your dreams and He will interpret them for you. The prison you are finding yourself in where your dreams and inaction are killing you may be just the place you need to be in for you to realize that you have one option that you can rely on. One option you have to revolutionize how you see your predicament. If Jesus saves us from a certain eternity in oblivion, how hard is it then to have our deepest longings and desires interpreted a new way, a fresh way by the only God that loved us enough to call us to Him?
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