God comforts the disturbed, and disturbs the comforted

I feel compelled to share a dream that I actually remember quite vividly,even after a week, unlike most of my other dreams.

So there I was, in Sioux Falls or some other reasonably-large city, with several of my cohorts, who will remain unnamed mostly because I cannot remember who they were.  We found one hundred dollars somewhere, but we decided that we should give it to some people who needed it more than us.  Soon after, we spotted a homeless shelter/soup kitchen, so we decided that'd the place if anywhere where we could find people who could use money.  We walked in, and the first thing I noticed was Jory Kok having a dance party with some friends.  I thought this was quite an odd occurence in a soup kitchen.  Anyways, we sat down and looked around the place, which was quite full of people.  There were quite a few people who were obviously quite poor, and most of them walked around as if they weren't psychologically sound, which was strange.  However, seated in several other booths were other people I knew, just hanging out and eating as if this was a normal restaurant.  I was quite disturbed at this point, and this was aggravated by the manager of the soup kitchen, a rather frazzled, tired-looking woman, who left the soup pot where she was serving from to feed us ice cream sundaes instead of continuing to feed the people.  The worst part was, we accepted the sundaes as if there was nothing out of the ordinary about it and joined some other friends hanging out.  We began on a mission to help others, and ended up forgetting them for our own selfish gain.


I woke up with my head spinning; there are so many things wrong with that dream that I could comment on.  My subconscious view of people in poverty, our society/church's reaction to poverty, our sometimes casual attitude toward the imbalances in our society, the condition of the unfair food distribution that we take part in every day.  This semester several books and a speaker have really taken jabs at me in my comfortable middle class life and my view and reaction to those who are below the lower class.  I've felt twinges of guilt and anger about poverty, but I think the last 4 months or so have changed those twinges to pain sometimes.  I wish I would do more, but I've yet to actually do something besides rethink buying stuff when I shop.  I think the dream just showed me what my life might look like right now.  It bothered me.  And I hope it continues to.