is ignorance really bliss?

There’s an old song, sung by Dollie Parton, that says, “but I really don’t want to know”. We know the song is a lover talking about their significant other and wondering how many arms have held them “oh so tight”, each verse lists a new deed they wished they knew about, but the final answer is always that they really don’t want to know. 

There are people who will not, who absolutely refuse and will do anything to keep from getting on a scale to see how much they weigh! 

                                                My question is this…

does not knowing change the fact that you have either gained weight or lost it? 

There are people who throw bills away without opening them so that they “never received” them and don’t want to know how much they owe…

                       does it keep the debtors from coming after them? No, it doesn’t!

There have been things I didn’t want to know about, but the facts would show up in my dreams and I would know anyway. When the dream is so plain that you can describe the clothes and hairstyle of a person then you are faced with the dilemma of whether you tell the one about whom you dreamed about it or choose to ignore it? 

                                             It’s not an easy choice either way.

Before I learned to edit how to say and how much to say, (youth is so wasted on the young,) I told a person about a dream I had about her because it was very plain…and it was not a good thing to have said in front of others! I told her I had dreamed that she was pregnant… I noticed she was speechless and red-faced, I felt so embarrassed I just walked away… later I found that while the pregnancy had been shown to me, the fact that her husband had a vasectomy years before, making the chances that the baby was his very slim to none… had not! OOPS!

Another time, being a little wiser, I called a single young woman and told her that I dreamed she had a baby! I described the baby completely from the sex, the hair and eye color down to seeing the child wearing little high-topped white shoes. I told her that if she didn’t want that dream to come to pass, she needed to be very careful. 

                              She got so angry with me that she slammed the phone down 

and left my ears ringing! This was when it really wasn’t socially accepted to be pregnant “out-of-wedlock”.

          In a few weeks I got a call from that young lady, and she told me that she hadn’t known it but she was already pregnant when I had told her the dream.

The end of that story is that the child was born it looked exactly as I had told her it would, which was just like the “dad”!

The first person was having an affair and the second had already done the deed that got her that way, 

                                    So, what good did it do to tell them? 

Does having this gift really help or hurt? It has been my experience that both are true. 

In the Bible we read of Joseph who had dreams of grandeur and in his youthful zeal told his brothers believing they would be happy to find out they were going to “bow” to him in the future, I think even I would have been too smart to repeat that one! That series of dreams got him sold into slavery!

But the gift came in handy when while in jail serving time for attempted rape, of which he was innocent; the King had a dream that needed an interpretation. Joseph had interpreted dreams for some fellow inmates and one of them told the King about it. The end of the story is that Joseph was called to interpret the dream and long story short Joseph ended up being second in command over all Egypt. When his brothers came to Egypt looking for food guess who oversaw giving it to them? You already knew that didn’t you? His dream came to pass as his brothers bowed to him as the ruler of Egypt to whom they were beholden for their supplies!

Daniel had dreams and visions of things that are happening in our present day, and he had the gift of interpreting dreams, which he did for the King and he, like Joseph, ended up gaining the King’s favor.

But I digress, the point was that sometimes we see things that we would rather not know because it makes us responsible to do something about it, or at least that’s the way it feels.

When my dad was a young evangelist working in a steel mill for ten cents an hour to earn money to buy a tent in which to hold his revivals, he would take the opportunity to witness to all the men where he worked. One day he was talking to a guy that was particularly rough about Jesus when the man held up his hand and said, “Stop talking to me about Jesus, the more you know the more you are held accountable for!” My dad chuckled at him and said, “My friend, if you know that then you already know too much!” I will tell you that in the end before my dad had enough money to purchase his tent, he had won his fellow-worker over to the Lord and had prayed the Sinner’s prayer with him!

The point is this, ignorance is not bliss it only puts off the inevitable, and whether it concerns a relationship, your bills, your weight, or your salvation, what you don’t know can indeed hurt you.

Learn all you can, be prepared, know what you believe, and why you believe it so that when you need to stand up and be counted you will actually know what you are talking about!

You really do want to know…