John Mark Comer once said something like this: (and I'm paraphrasing here) If we spend roughly 1/3 of our lives sleeping by design, then why would our Creator opt to never access or influence such a significant portion of our lives?" I tend to agree.
Something significant seems to be happening to me in my subconscious dream life. It seems to correlate with the timing of when I began serving as an intercessor and amping up my prayer life. I know this is strange territory that makes my highly rational, pro-science-explains-everything colleagues cringe and my highly cerebral Christian brothers and sisters back away slowly but that doesn’t make these experiences any less valid.
Let me tell you about the most one...
I am in a foreign country. I think it's in Africa. We are moving through an airport, then the streets, and then approach a train station. There are people there who have covered themselves with sheets and blankets. I somehow learn that in this culture, the poor are not permitted to show their faces or speak in public. But their arms and legs are exposed--begging, reaching, grabbing at people as they pass by. My children try to see who is under the covers. Someone we are traveling with picks up my son and guides my daughter away by the hand, gently chastising them. But no one is trying to hurt them.
My husband is placing silver coins into outstretched palms and tin cups. I hear someone tell him that what he is doing is pointless "a drop in the ocean, son" but he doesn't listen. I am praying a song over and over in my head, " GOD have mercy on them. Christ have mercy on them." Then we approach the entrance of the train station. A sea of hundreds of these people are barring the entrance--multi-colored, voiceless, nameless, faceless ghosts stretching as far as my eye can see. People are stepping on them--soaking the blankets with blood, dislocating joints, crunching fragile bones beneath their shoes. No one cries, no one screams. Some are dead.
The ones doing the stepping never hesitate or appear conflicted. They are heading to work or are on vacation. This is simply the way of this culture. There is nothing to be done about it. I hear a line from Sweeney Todd ring true in my ears, "The history of the world, my love, is who gets eaten and who gets to eat." The cheerful refrain screeches to a distorted end, the way a record scratches under the hand of a skilled DJ. Whoever is controlling the record player seems to also be controlling this dream. I freeze in front of this spectacle, unable to move forward but unable to look away. "I dare you to step on them." I hear the voice say. And then the dream ends.
1 Peter 2:5 says, “You also, like living stones, are being built into a spiritual house to be a holy priesthood, offering spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.” (NIV) I am a single stone in an enormous temple, a single cell in a complex organism, a link in a complicated chemical equation that was written eons before I was even a concept.
I imagine GOD masterfully orchestrating this impossibly complicated chain of chemical events to create the precise reaction needed to alter the course of human history. Will it rapidly boil over like soup on a cauldron, or ooze down the sides like lava coming out of a volcano? Will it spontaneously combust or will it do something imperceptible to the human eye? No one knows.
I keep asking myself what would I actually do if this dream scenario ever happened in real life. I know what the courageous version of myself would do. I would grab a blanket and join the people on the ground with my face exposed, daring anyone who comes along to step on me to get to them. But I’m not always courageous. No one is. The truth is, I would probably just sink to my knees and pray, asking GOD what He expects a Jamaican immigrant/American citizen doctor-wife-mama with no resources or influence to do about a problem this enormous. I just don't know. Do you???
I can sense a fundamental shift taking place, one tectonic plate at a time. It’s the slow overturning of my entire worldview, the deafening clank of the rusty cogs in the wheel grinding against each other unwillingly as the march of time turns me toward a different life and a different way of life. Perhaps this shift is happening on a more dramatic level in my dream life out of necessity while my conscious mind and body prepare to fully embrace it when the time is right. All I know to do is to train my attention on it as much as possible. I'm staying open to the possibility that something drastic might need to take place in my awake life to make room for this new way of living. If I am being overturned, I hope it’s to more fully align me with the upside-down nature of the heavenly kingdom.
After all, I am more than just a professing Christian. I actually believe the weird stuff--the bodily resurrection of Christ, GOD in three persons, the Holy Spirit guiding and enabling people to accomplish GOD's will, and bodies being raised from the dead in a glorified state. I actually believe in Jesus’s vision of a renewed Earth that will one day fully overlap with the heavens. I don’t actually want any particular human government or person to fully succeed let alone expect my unwavering allegiance. I just want Jesus. I want to sit under that fig tree in the garden completely unafraid of the chaos raging around me without yielding to the temptation to become indifferent to it.
So yea--colorful ghosts, a zombie apocalypse, superpowered humans--bring it on. This present reality is a miserable hack with the hope of restoring humanity and our planet resting in the hands of the wealthiest, cruelest, most power-hungry among us, the very beings responsible for destroying all of it in the first place, and who never seem to learn from the mistakes their ancestors made dozens, hundreds, and thousands of years ago. I would like to take my chances on the zombie apocalypse, please!
Stay Thoughtful.
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