Dreams and Polar Bears

I ask God each day for fresh insight. This is what he put on my heart Monday morning.

As I awoke from my dream about a polar bear I wondered if it had a meaning. The dream went something like this. My nephew and I were setting together when he got the attention of a Polar bear. I asked him “are you crazy?” “I have experience with these polar bears, and they are tough to get rid of, and nothing good comes of it.” Well, this polar bear followed us home, and he gave us a hard time. In my mind I knew what the bear wanted. It wanted to kill us. It also was willing to kill anyone around us as well. (Family, friends, or any unlucky bystander) In the dream the bear was wreaking havoc. His behavior was getting worse and worse. It was finally a lot like that insurance company’s commercial where the bear eats the inside of a car. Well, as I pondered this dream it struck me as a metaphor of addiction. It also reminds me of sin. In Gen 4:7 “…But if you do not do what is right sin is crouching at your door; it desires to have you, but you must master it.”

The question comes to mind, “are we crazy?” The teachers of the law in the Old Testament tried to build a fence around the law so that the people would not fall prey to sin. It occurs to me that we need fences in our lives. We would do much better not to bring polar bears into our lives. But what do we do if we have one in our lives? One man against a bear is not good odds, but if we band together we can kill these polar bears together one at a time. Jesus said, “I have come to bring you life and to bring it more abundantly.”