September 13th, 2008

It has been an alright day today even though I worked through most of it. It was a very ordinary and uneventful day.

The only thing that made the day unordinary was that I had a dream. A dream that disturbed me, more by the fact that it was not the first dream like it that I’ve had like it. I dreamed about teeth. How peculiar right? In the dream I was running my tongue over my teeth very aware that several of my teeth felt extremely loose. I touched one with my finger and it fell out as did the one next to it. I was afraid that all of them would fall out. I felt panicked and I yelled for my Mom. She came to the top of the stairs confused at what I was so upset about. I told her, showed her and then I woke up.

This was not the only dream, the only mention of ’teeth’ that I’ve experienced. A few months ago I dreamt about teeth cracking. That I had bit down on something and my teeth began to crack and break off. The same feelings of fear, anxiety and confusion coloured that dream.

My train of thought leaps randomly from the basis of these two peculiarly similar dreams to other instances that have crept into my mind and nested there. I think it has something to do with maturity if it has meaning at all. Perhaps it’s just random with no rhyme or reason and I’m pulling rabbits out of thin air, but stick with me for the sake of speculation.

My train of thought upon waking up was really random. I thought about roots. About how the roots must have been bad or how there must have been something terribly wrong the gums. And then I was reminded of how it was similar to the parable of the seeds. I helped with Sunday School in the middle of the summer and as we went over the familiar parable about the farmer who sowed seed; some fell on hard ground, some in rocks, some in thistles, some in good ground etc; and because the Olympics were this summer we tried to tie the games into the lesson.

I started to think about how our hearts are like a garden. In a garden there are paths where the ground is hard, there are rocky places and places with weeds and there is good soil. It’s all one garden but the soil has many different characteristics. That is like our hearts. There are things that we are able to accept and understand easily and then there are things that we struggle with. God sows his seeds into our hearts, not just in places where there is good soil, but into every place.

In a way that seed is like a test. God throws his seeds onto the hard ground of our hearts and allows us to see that the seeds are eaten by birds because until we recognize that that part of our heart is hard we will not consider cultivating the ground to made it softer. It’s the same with the other illustrations. He throws seeds into the rocky ground of our hearts so that we will be better able to determine what influences need to be cast out of the garden and he plants seeds where weeds will grow up to show us what actions and attitudes we need to change. And he throws seeds into the good soil of our hearts to give us a vision and a hope. Those seeds were planted to be an encouragement for us, so that we have high expectations for a life that is abundant. As those seeds sprout and flourish we are able to see what a ‘real’ garden looks like and we have something to compare the poor growth in other parts of our hearts against.

The Olympic motto encourages personal achievement. The whole goal is to work to become the very best that we can be, to push our personal boundaries and to strive for excellence. This parable encourages us to do the same. It urges us to examine the soil of our hearts, to search ourselves and cultivate the soil of our heart so that we may bear fruit for Jesus.

At 3 or 4 in the morning when I woke up it related to the whole bad root, gum decay part of the dream a whole lot better than it does now… I’m going to cut this in half, call this half the 13th and the next the 14th because I didn’t get to post it last night. It’s long, I’m tired and feeling very uncreative so this is going to last two days.