Blog on the Lillypad
Saturday, September 06, 2003
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When our world changed forever Part 2. I jumped awake from the dream and sat right up. The first words through my head were "O God, why did You make me dream that?" It was an immediate burden to confront such strangeness. I have known far too many Christians who get sidetracked by tongues and dreams and faith healing and second blessings. As a much younger woman, I had been briefly entranced with dreams and had soon realized its a great big trap of the spiritual life. Enlightenment comes from the Word of God. |
Once, in my late twenties or perhaps early thirties, I'd had a genuinely precognizant dream. I'd dreamed that a former teacher of mine with whom I stayed in contact (a nun), was suddenly ill, and then the sisters were shouting to me over a great distance that she was dead. It frightened me so much that the next day I called to see if she was all right. My anxious, long distance phone call amazed the sisters. She had fallen the night before, breaking one leg in two places and the other in three places and was in serious condition. But she recovered.
But that dream had not been accurate as a predictive dream, not strictly speaking. I had viewed it as the Lord's nudge to me to tell me to get up to Pennsylvania and see her. There had been the dream; there had been the verification that it was from the Lord (because something really was wrong), and there had been the necessary action that God required of me, (which I obeyed.) Afterwards, it took me a few months to realize that such events are rare and just move on. But I did. The heart of Christianity is knowing Christ, not experiencing wonders. Eventually, as I saw how subjective so many people are who long for and live for such phenomena, I realized all over again that dreams, tongues, visions, etc., are a tangent.
So my first reaction was a certain mystification that God may have sent me this powerful, incredible dream, and I didn't really think it was appropriate. Then I realized that I was in danger of forgetting it. And if it was supposed to be meaningful, I had to be wary of muddling it up with my own thoughts and reactions. So I carefully recalled it, moment by moment, and ruled out anything that I took to be interpretation on my part rather than the dream itself. I repeated the bare bones, strictly honest account of the dream back to myself a few times and even swung my feet over the edge of the bed to go find pen and paper, but then I worried that writing it out would cause me to dramatize it.
It had actually been a very brief dream, so once I got it as simple as it had actually been in my experience of it, I had to consider what to do. The very real danger of all of this being a distraction from the real business of VALKYRIES and the calling to speak for the victims of rabid, heretical forms of Fundamentalism still troubled me. Finally, I decided that God, as the sovereign over all things that we experience, could be left to His purposes. I only needed enough people to witness that I'd had the dream so that I could have verification. And I also wanted to know what a select few people thought so that I could feel better about discussing the dream. I decided to choose three very different people, and I would tell them the bare bones account of the dream and see what they said. And, I promised myself, at this stage I wouldn't tell anybody else or trouble Christians with the tangent of dream-visions. Nor would I trouble myself further, if I could help it. So then I prayed and asked the Lord for wisdom and to show me what to do if this dream had been from Him; or to help me forget about it if it had not been from Him.
In retrospect, I see that I was still thinking of any dream sent from God as a nudge from God to do something very specific. That's how it had been the one other time: I had been sure that the Lord had wanted me to go see this former teacher and witness to her. Once it had been verified that I'd been "nudged" by God, I obeyed and went. But I didn't realize that, in this case, it wasn't quite that simple. The dream had been terrifying, but in spite of it, I had no clue of what was ahead. My greatest concerns were that hard hearted Fundamentalist preachers were excusing themselves from confronting the awful corruption that was brutalizing children and women and destroying families in Christian Fundamentalism; and that Moody Press had undertaken---with no prompting from me---to consider publishing VALKYRIES, my life's work about the Grace of God.
I lay back down, still troubled by the strange dream, but more aware of the two current spiritual issues in my life and my responsibilities to both of them. I had to honor God's righteousness by speaking for those who have no voice; and I had to ensure that VALKYRIES was never trivialized into being just another ridiculous goody-two shoes Christian novel.
Over the next week, I selected three very different people to talk to: Dr. Steven Henry, a brilliant graduate from Yale with whom I worked. Steve is a medical doctor and had just earned a Masters in Biotech Engineering. He also had done his undergraduate work in History. Steve believed in God in a philosophical way. For me, he was at the Rationalist end of the spectrum. In spite of what I took to be a bit of intellectual snobbishness at times (which may be excused because he is brilliant) Steve always behaved with generosity, patience, and a high sense of his responsibilities to others. When I told him about the dream the next day, he would not absolutely say it was not visionary, but he told me he believed that because I study astrology and the Bible, it was pretty normal for me to have a dream with such startling images. I told him I'd never had a dream like that, not ever, but he said that probably the pressure from the FFF and the news regarding my book had contributed to an extraordinary state of mind to produce such a dream.
The second person, Margaret Lester, is an executive Marketing person with IBM, and she is a believer in Christ. I told her about the dream the next week at church. Margaret is a "thorough" believer. She reads the great thinkers and preachers of our day and devotes a good part of her time to understanding her faith. Like Steve, Margaret did not want to say the dream absolutely could not be visionary. But her conclusion was that probably it was just a startling dream.
Finally, I told the dream to Jeanne Luttrell, a 77 year old woman at my church who read her Bible and prayed daily (on her knees). Jeanne is both Presbyterian and Charismatic. She's on the opposite end of the spectrum from Steve. She tends to believe everything is a miracle. But even though I disapprove of this mindset as a general rule, Jeanne's life and consistency as a Christian prompted her as my third choice. Anybody who, at the age of 77, admonishes people to trust Christ is a person worth consulting. Jeanne, of course, believed that the dream was from the Lord. But she cautioned me to just let it rest and let God do whatever He intended to do. Then she tried to get me to read one of her Charismatic magazines, and I rolled my eyes and said, "Oh Jeanne!" So we had tea instead.
