Walking with Jesus

A few days ago I had a dream. I was observing a church-based radio broadcast and call-in show with a guest speaker (not me). A young man named Chris was fielding phone calls on the air with questions about persecution and the end times, and how they relate (over against how many have been taught to think they relate). If you are a believer, I am sure you can sometimes feel the clock ticking as I can. He had an emotional moment in one call and suddenly handed the headset and mic to me. Praying even as I took it, I preached without notes from Matthew 24, Daniel, and Revelation for about 15 minutes. One phrase the Lord gave me as I preached summed it up as far as End Time Persecution: Before heaven comes down to earth, earth will be more like hell than it has ever been before. That isn't an overstatement, but it isn't meant to panic anyone either. It is just what it is going to be like. The world is dividing light and dark. Some of us (in spite of our own evil hearts) have been...

. Last night I dreamt there was a talent show or something in my old High School Auditorium. My friend Tim was up as a crowd slowly filled the room, and I along with some other guys we used to work with at Beltway were moving all over the stage picking up wires and cleaning up after Tim as he moved from instrument to instrument, others joining in as according to his changes. We were having fun with it, being silly. I was sitting on the floor behind the drums (not playing them) and I had just decided to pick up a mic and sing something when Tim (now on guitar) began singing this upbeat worship song. I think it originally had a bridge, but I don't remember it, because it took me a moment to realize that this song was completely new. I just sat there listening, all thoughts of performing vanquished from my mind, as worship broke forth. As I wrote down these words this morning and sang this "new song unto the Lord" I realized that they were about Olivia, about me, about lo...

. It’s 2 AM. Last night I had a dream. It was a mystery dream, a crime being solved and a perpetrator caught. Some civilized animals were attempting in their humorously inadequate ways to catch a mysterious thief. They would devise some elaborate scheme, see it falling to ruin, and then the scene would freeze, and back up to 10 or 15 minutes earlier in the story, with the possibility of changing the events and the unsuccessful outcome. It was an amusing dream, and I watched as it moved progressively backwards from after midnight to early evening to the preceding dusk. I saw a mouse and a spider perched on a bookshelf/nook, ready to catch the thief, but he came at them from behind, from through a crack in the wall behind their perch. The scene froze and backed up. I saw a possum dropping an elaborate net onto the roof of a car, where it left a mark, showing that the trap would work. Yet, the culprit came at the bait another way and the possum fumbled with the branch and dropped it wron...

Last night I had several dreams. The first began in a room and in it I looked out into the hallway. I didn’t know the room, but I knew the hallway. It was the hallway from the house I grew up in. I dream about that house, or a semblance of it frequently, and it occurred to me when I woke up this morning that it was a foundational reality, a template, for my understanding of the world. We all have these proto-realities, these templates for understanding the world. They can be good (like a great elementary school experience) or bad (like an abusive, adulterous, or alcoholic father). But, since they are our first understanding of a given reality, they become of standard for ‘truth’ in that situation. All ‘homes’ should remind us of our childhood home in order to feel like a ‘home’. All ‘loves’ should recall our first ‘love’. All ‘fathers’ are either loving or untrustworthy based on our experience of ‘father.’ The problem arises in that our first experiences, our templates, are so ofte...

Sometimes our dreams tell us more than we can hear. Last night I had a dream that I'm sure had more in it than I can now recall. I had a wheeled crate full of discarded vines and I was working my way down a residential alley, a concrete drive between small houses. In front of most of the houses people were putting up fences, small yards which they were decorating for Halloween. People I knew and strangers alike were hauling in lumber, settting out friendly Jack-O-Lanterns, stacking stalks of corn against a wall, or preparing food for guests. I was like a school assignment all the parents were helping their kids with. The yards filled most of the alley, with paths leading to the homes and gates at regular intervals between opposing yards, as if to section off the alley into venues. I pushed my cart uphill through each gate, barely squeezing through, until I got to a large gate end of the alley. There, between two carts of watermelon against one of the gate doors, I found a place...