In the next few days I will have a guest writer here, Gayle, who will post about a dream she had recently. I have a few ‘key’ dreams per year that help me understand some aspect or I gain a new perspective. There is a common ‘place’ I visit in dreams and when there gain an insight I have never had before, so the dream always contains a surprise. The element of newness and surprise is always underlined in that those present do not get the revelation at all, and the place is known for the prophetic and response to God. We all see in part and given the nature of the people at the place not getting the revelation it symbolically shows there is always new revelation. A few a year, but Gayle has many. We have our apartment in Oliva resulting from two dreams she had, including one that had her typing in a (previously unknown) Spanish word ‘azahar’ into a google map to show someone where we live. 700metres away from our apartment in Oliva on the sign pointing toward our apartment is the very word ‘azahar’ (orange blossom).
Earlier this year we were sent a dream concerning the COVID virus and its path. The person who sent it had been praying about two things a) COVID and b) how would God communicate times and seasons in an urban / Western setting (in contrast to Pharaoh and the agricultural setting, with cows and grain).
The dream has been for us very key in understanding the phases the virus is currently and will go through.
Anyway… dreams. They are fascinating. Recently we read of one that showed the rise of civil war in their land, complete with militia on the streets, with the twist that God was standing behind these militia to give them success, effectively returning ‘the nation to God’. Wow! How does one interpret that?
Dreams can be from God and show us what we had never considered before. They can be from ‘God’ (maybe, or from our own ‘soul’) showing us more about ourselves than about God’s desire / plan for what is to come.
Our theological convictions of course affect how we interpret a dream. If violence is one of God’s normal tools, and there is a time to pick up the sword for the Gospel we will go one way with the interpretation… if the path of non-violent resistance is seen as the Jesus’ (third-)way then we will go another way. (Someone known to some of the readers of this blog, Charles Strohmer, has responded to the theology of ‘get a sword’ very eloquently here):
We need to be challenged concerning our beliefs when we present a dream, we need to be open to them being about us, not a ‘God-dream’. We all see in part, and the lack of sight is often springing from my distorted alignment and any allegiance that sits alongside my allegiance to Christ (hence my view on not taking an oath in court or elsewhere).
All the above is to give a little backdrop to the guest writer of all guest writers who will have fingers to keyboard probably by the end of the week. The dream seems to be very timely in this epoch, and is to be weighed.