Dreaming Epic Proportions
You know that dream you had that fits right into a sci-fi movie? Well, let me tell you, this is one scene I’ll give you for that film you’re working on . . . I’ll warn you beforehand that my dreams are crazy adventurous, bending the rules of physics, with sub-plots, and are highly dangerous. And, yes, I do dream in color. . . .
This is what happened.
Dark, almost inherently so was the void, the tunnel. Trickling movement made its tenuous threads thick along the corners of my eyes. Skeletons. Pieces. Broken debris. Dirt.
He yanks my arm. I ignore the tug as my eyes latch to a tiny object on a pedestal. It glows faintly. Jumping to it, I flip it open, the light in the pages pouncing forward. A highlighted section finds its way to my eyes as I hold it up, ” . . . the Good Shepherd.” Flowers and medieval renditions of knights and shields press their faces into my view. I hold out the book to the darkness, and everything whirls to a tumultuous . . . clarity.
We’re standing in the backyard now. Everything is the same. Basketball rim high above. Azaleas in bloom. Birds . . . not chirping. Nothing moving. No wind. No voice. Nothing. He stares at me with his hazel eyes. Does he have a sword in his hand? Everything’s too quiet. And, then a puppy bounds into my sight. He’s been there, it seems.
Then, my eyes screech to a halt as the screaming image lurches into view, croaks and creaks and rocking bellows collapsing onto my ears. “We have to run . . .” I squeak. Is that an audible sentence? He pivots. I think we both screamed when the steel ship miles wide and a football field high collided with the concrete in front of us. A metal chain yanks at the starboard side as the ship bounces like a ball in screeching clangs as houses go down like the tide rolling. Toward us. He ducks, me under his arm, as the ship barely reels over us in a jolting jump. The rocks tremble.
“Go! Go!” No need to say it twice. We were both off and running into the street, the alley. Something in the prophecies (who knows where I came across those) said, “laying in the ground . . . the ground. We have to–” I tremble, my words almost falling out as the ship behind us springs back on its chain. Much like a heat-seeking bowling ball, the tide turns and the ship heads straight for us. Feeling like a mouse haunted by a hawk. “Lay down in the ground?” He bows to the earth. “No!” Come on, there has to be another explanation . . . “The sewers!”
The thunder of the booming ship runs over the banging of my heart. He goes down first, then me, then the dog. The worst kind of noise, like the jaws of a tyrannosaurus rex, bites the earth. Everything quakes. Including me. This sewer system is more like an abyss than a sewer. Chain-linked fences–green–span the place on both sides. Nothing below–just blackness . . . and nothing as walls besides those green coils. I hang on to this place with everything I have as the ship booms on.
I look at him, his strong hands holding the dog in place between both fences. A vision rocks my gaze as I cling against the clanking green.
I see a creature as dark as the night, dressed as dazzling as the flowers. It holds its eyes in mine, smiling wretchedly. A facto-mortem, they’re called. They were the things that placed the poisonous apple in Snow White’s story . . . the spinning wheel in Aurora’s way . . . the obstacles of passivity. In a spiral of pain, the world tosses back to me my clinging hands.
“We need to act now . . . or we’ll become a fairytale.”
He stares at me. The gleam of a shaft of sunlight wilting his expression. He opens his mouth . . .
The end. I know. Best time to wake up.
But, the funny thing is–the subconscious tie of truth–the moral to this dream. The sin of passivity. I was talking to God about this the other day . . . how belief and action are one and the same. Lee Strobel once said in an interview, “Don’t tell me what you believe. Show me how you live, and then I’ll tell you what you believe.”
Faith is action. Not passivity. The obstacles in our lives are set like chess pieces in the battlefield of the mind. And, it takes time, it takes effort, it takes courage to make a move.
Don’t let the facto-mortem . . . “death facts” get you. There is a far greater Truth out there we need to be actively pursuing.
So, that was my dream. What a way to start the day waking from that one. Live to die another day, I say. For, to me to live is Christ and to die is gain. I will take up my cross . . . daily . . . and follow Him. Dead to myself. But oh so alive.
And, in that principle we must find that God is not a crutch. He’s powerful. Much more powerful than we could ever imagine. In Exodus, God tells Moses to “be sure to do the WONDERS that I have placed within your power before Pharaoh.” What a verse! God has put wonders in our paths to accomplish. That means YOU are a powerful being, child of the Most High God, Who has called you to do wonders through Christ Jesus’s grace.
So above the standpoint of a dream, let me say this . . . Don’t let people think for you . . . But, then I just did, didn’t I? The point being–fill your head with God-sized wonders and truths . . . not the arguments, opinions, thoughts of the world or other people . . . but of God. He’s the one that matters. And, He has given you the power to move . . . to have your being in Him. To act. What’s your choice?
