Killed By Their Dreams

 

I was reading Joseph’s story, you know the one in the bible, the guy who was his father’s favorite and got sold by his brothers for being a dreamer and a tattle tale, yeah that guy. It’s a bit unfair to call it a story because the idea of a story is something that did not happen when this one actually did, let’s call it a narrative. So as I was reading the narrative of Joseph I came to the part where he is in prison falsely accused of sleeping with Potiphar’s wife. Anyhoo so Joseph is in prison falsely accused and soon finds favor in the eyes of the chief jailer and is given a role in the prison. It was though this role that he meets the two guys who this is all about.

 

The baker is almost always bald in pictures, this has always puzzled me

 

Enter Pharaoh’s Chief Baker and Cup Bearer, I’d like to call the first guy the Baker in Chief, it sounds a little more promising. These guys had pretty good jobs, one of them had a pretty sweet gig in my opinion, the cup bearer. He would go everywhere with the Pharaoh and make sure Pharaoh had a cup in his hand when he got parched, turns out it was a pretty high risk job because the guy was in prison as a result of the job. So both of these guys get the sack around the same period of time and probably stuck together because of their similar backgrounds. They probably stood out like sore thumbs among the general population.

So Joseph would probably meet up with them while doing his rounds and this one time he is walking passed and they are more sulky than usual, he asks what’s wrong, him being the helpful guy that he was and they open fourth like a fountain of words about their dreams. He helps them out with his interpretation, strictly speaking it was God’s, and they eventually come to pass, as all of God’s degrees do. The reason you my one reader are here is the ‘why’ of it all.

As you may know the narrative the Baker was killed and the cup bearer was restored. Logically speaking this is a stupid move. You kill of the guy who is more skilled, probably has more traction with the people in his field and has the more useful task, after all bread and all baked goods should be more essential than wine and even more than a guy whose very job is to hold a glass before it is taken from him. The baker was more useful than the cup bearer.

Which ever way you think about it, food trumps wine

These two guys had sucky lives after their demotion to prison. Serving a Pharaoh who sounds bipolar to me must not have been a walk in the park. The man would hire, fire, kill or pardon at a whim. So whereas their lives at this point sucked there was hope, small, but there was hope. Then came the dreams. I’m sure they struggled to think of the dream as a mere dream or something that should be taken seriously. I can personally imagine them meeting each other on the day post having the dreams and both would be absent minded, Around noon they would discover that the other guy was not looking spry either at which point they would spend the rest of the day denying anything was wrong. Only to confess the real deal to the other guy the next day. I figure the baker caved first, he strikes me as the softy.

Now each would have not just his own sucky dream to figure out but his friend’s too. SO when Joseph walked in with his solution things must have looked up a bit. Things changed very fast after Joseph told them the meaning of their dreams. You can imagine how tricky it was for the cup bearer, hoping that the prediction was true yet trying to convince his friend it was not. It must have been a weird wait. Come the day Joseph’s interpretation proved to be right. One was exalted and the other was demoted. Where am I getting with this? Well I’m glad you asked.

God’s choosing of who and what he wills is not based off of the human view of what is important. It is based off of what he wills, period. And what he wills always comes to pass. We all have our hopes and dreams and the world encourages us to dream “shoot for the stars”, they say. “Nothing can hold you back” uh…. Wrong. God owns and controls it all. Dream as you might there is a serious flaw in all you plan on doing if you do not make him paramount because at the end of the day he is paramount. It is he who says to this happen and it does or to the other do not happen and it does not, whether we think something is to our good and benefit or not.

Uhhhh... WRONG! Completely wrong!

It is the way of the sinful nature to have you think that you are the main determining factor in the way of your life but everything in the world is telling you contrary. You cannot change time, make it move fast or slow. You cant even determine all that you will do with your time, no one is that free, a lot of your movements are determined for you by people who have their moves determined for them. The student has his movement determined by the lecturers, who have their movement determined by some sort of chancellor, who has his movement determined by an owner of the institution, who have their moves determined by a government who have their moves determined by the people. It’s an endless cycle of a lack of power and control.

The illusion of control is sold at every corner by the world yet disproved by the world itself. God on the other hand is the determining factor of all. Knowing that God controls it all is only step one unfortunately. The main step is submitting to this and living with this, in the words of the song ‘At The Foot of The Cross’, forever in your view.

The National Anthem: Beat my chest bang my drum and shout from the rooftop

This one has been the one that has given me the most thought of the final three. I knew what “today in parliament would be” and I had a basic construct of “the epilogue” but the national anthem, that one has troubled. I figured it out after waking up from the nap that I just woke up from, in short I figured it out five minutes ago. If you want to split hairs you can say this is improvising on my part but it really isn’t.

For those of you intent on splitting hairs

So yesterday I had a conversation with a guy who ridiculed my blogging, not the first and won’t be the last. People have a funny impression of bloggers and a lot of the misconceptions come from those who pay too much attention to shows like gossip girl. This is a theory, because I have not watched gossip girl, granted in a moment of weakness I actually thought about it, what can I say I was bored. Anyway the main point of the conversation was why do you blog. I’m not someone who people want to sit down and read his every thought like my father. And I’m not a thirteen year old girl talking about celebrity gossip. So why do you blog?

I’m quite the charismatic thinker, so the moment I thought of this I immediately pictured myself standing on a rooftop in some African warrior attire, with the Rambo polish under my eyes, can’t leave that out, beating my chest and banging my drum simultaneously telling the world why I write. It’s not a poem, it’s not a song. Its words, it’s my National anthem

I would be the guy in front, just of a negroid persuasion

I write because I can, I write because I should. It helps keep me in check because I frequently put my thoughts down somewhere, not just on the blog. I keep track of who I was and what I want to be through what I write and what I wrote. I write to tell everyone what is important to me, I write to tell them in my own weird way how much of a mess it is in my head and yet I am willing to use my hopelessness for Gods cause and he is more than willing to take my poor something and turn into something more.

I write not for the fame or the prestige, in all likelihood I will not get it. I write not to have my name exalted or thought of more. I write not to look like a deep thinker because I’m not, I’m actually quite stupid. I make the same mistakes over and over and over again and yet because God keeps picking me up I can’t help but tell someone something. I write not to speak of me, I write to speak of him through me. If all you see in what I write is me then I have messed up, really messed up. I write because unlike words that fade away these remain in the collective, stagnant, waiting to be used for me or against me. These words that remain up there long after my voice has faded in sleep, silence or death will be there to remind me of who I am and who I was.

I write because to some extent I am driven by my passion. I try not to let it control me but every once in a while it does. My passion for my God and my passion for my country. My passion that leads me to write about what’s wrong and what’s right. Leads me to write about how people conclude too fast or sometimes think too little. All this is my opinion but I write because I have a message for the collective that I want them to know and me sitting in my quiet corner of the world does nothing for that. I could watch the world rot and scoff or I can do what I can, I can write.

I write because this is my journey, my journal of my Journey in Cyprus. I write because I figure this is not the end but merely a chapter of my life. I write because I want to savour these moments that I have had over here, the words will help me remember the time. The words will refresh the memory, the words will pain the heart and drive it on to do more. If I ever become complacent I will look back on the thoughts of a younger me and be ashamed. If I go from strength to strength I will look back on the thoughts of a younger me and nod with approval.

As I look back later on in life, I wonder what I will see

I write to help others but I especially write to help me. Because I know I am weak and I constantly need reminding. Every time I put my hands to the keyboard I come to a burning realisation of my flaws and my falls. There are times when I want to write and I know that my life has not been what I want to write and this is a burden that has brought me back to my lord in prayer many a time. I write to let those I speak to rarely know what’s happening with me. I write for many reasons but as I stand here on a roof top, granted a proverbial one, rhythmically beating my chest and my drum, granted a metaphorical drum, the main reason why I write is because I have a deep desire in me to speak of my God and whether you listen and read or not, I’m not sure, but because he has done so much for me… How can I not write?