I will admit, for the most part I am a practical, 21st Century American. As such, I find myself regularly having to challenge my worldview, values and beliefs. One such belief is that the spiritual realm of angels and demons ceased to manifest itself among mortals when John penned the last word of Revelation. Visions and dreams are merely hallucinations and our subconscious mind expressing suppressed thoughts and emotions. Right?
Until last night, that was most certainly my belief.
Let me back up a week or so. At this point in time, I am questioning almost every decision we have made this decade. Why did we move to Arkansas? Why did we change churches? Why did I go back to work? Why did we move out of our house before we sold it? These and so many more questions have consumed me.
Yesterday was the proverbial "straw" that broke the camels back. Due to our financial situation, I have been attempting to make everyone's Christmas gift this year. Once again, I am trying to do a good thing, and therefore expect the process to go smoothly. As I sat down to my sewing machine, it was anything but smooth. The machine made horrific groans as I attempted to stitch a simple seam, and the thread that spewed forth was most definitely as "unsmooth" as it comes.
On top of all the other stress I've experienced in the past few weeks, now I can't make the presents I had planned....and there is no back-up plan B. I realize my children are mature, Jesus-loving young adults who will completely understand the situation, and probably won't think I'm a terrible mother who doesn't give good things to her children at major Christian holidays when all their other friends are being showered with iCrap....but I just wanted to do this for them, dangit!~!!!!
So, after consuming an oh-so-healthy dinner of Chocolate Chex and rotting my brain with a few two many Netflix sit-coms, feeling like the sorriest excuse for a wife and mother and child of God ever to walk this planet, I went to bed. That's when my belief system was blown wide open. When my conscious mind was on autopilot, the spiritual world took the wheel.
Hear me now and believe me later...I simply don't buy into this stuff, at least not in America. Maybe this kind-of thing happens in South American jungles or tiny villages in Asian mountain ranges, but it most certainly does not happen in middle-class, suburban, hipster towns like Fayetteville. Right?
So there I was, in my dream, just standing on a bridge talking to a young woman. I didn't recognize her in the least, but I felt like I might know her somehow. She asked me how to know she's making the right decision, and I proceeded to tell her who Jesus is.
That's right...when I wasn't consciously choosing to think about God, I shared the Gospel with someone questioning life!
I know that might seem like a "coincidence," but I woke up absolutely consumed with JOY! You see, my goal in life is to get to that point at which, when I am not distracted by this world, my default thought life is all Jesus, only Jesus, completely Jesus. That dream, and the fact that I remember it, was a tiny little gift from my Father.
Even though things are so very difficult right now, and I'm having to make so many sacrifices and turn my back on so much I once held dear, its all worth it to reach that goal.
God did speak to me through a dream. It did happen....in America....to me : )
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