dreams

We talk rather loosely about our dreams.

The ones that I have through the night I seem to forget almost as soon as I wake (if not before). Which probably means that my mind, when left to itself, is a total jungle of nonsense and my dreams aren't worth recalling.

But I do have dreams, of course. Dreams that I can articulate. Dreams which are the picture of the future which I've dared, in waking, conscious moments of my life, to draw.

A girl was in to see me here today. By appointment. She's from these parts (as in Edinburgh) but studying down in England now. And she's doing a dissertation on the way in which the services within the Church of Scotland might have changed across the years.

There aren't that many books on the subject, she declared. At least not down south in Reading where she's at. Hardly surprising, I suppose!

So, with the dearth of books down south, she's taken this week to tour these northern climes and interview some ministers. What a pleasant girl she is! And what a pleasant hour it was to work through all the issues she was asking me about.

But she closed by simply asking me to tell her what I dream of for the worship of the people here. My dreams.

It was good to be put on the spot like that. And great to have the chance to spell them out.

My dreams.

I have my dreams all right. And I like to think it's God himself who gives me all these 'waking', thought-through dreams. Because that's what he says - "your young men will see visions, your old men will dream dreams".

I don't think those words are age-specific, mind! Young and old alike, I think God says, will have these visions and these dreams. Which I do.

And they're dear to my heart and they drive me on. Because I think they're dreams that God himself has given me - a kind of trailer for the 'movie' of his purpose for us here, a sort of privileged preview of the things he means to do.

There's a guy in the Bible who had quite literal, through-the-night and very much in-his-sleep dreams. Joseph.

He seemed able to remember them, too, when he woke. Which, as I say, doesn't much happen with me.

But it does for some folk here. I think that's maybe how the Lord best speaks with them and makes it clear it's him and not their own imagination running wild.

One of the girls who does so much among us here (well, 'girl' is the way I think of her ... she's actually my age pretty much: but, then, I think of myself as just an over-grown boy!) - she was in to see me for a while this afternoon.

She'd been away last week. And she'd really sensed God speaking very clearly to her through that time.

She'd had a dream. A very clear and very vivid dream. Which she was still remembering almost one whole week thereafter. Not just the details of the dream, but what and how she felt within the dream.

Very vivid. Very clear. And very pertinent indeed.

Because she knew immediately what it meant. She knew it was a picture of ourselves, us followers of Jesus here. And she knew just what the challenge was. For all of us.

I think she found it both thrilling and humbling and scary - all at once.

But it was right on the button in terms of what God is saying to us these days and where we're at. And her telling me this was just another potent confirmation of God's word to us today.

I'll not go into the details. But she used the word 'enslaved'. I'd spoken myself along similar lines this Sunday past. About Israel's response to the Lord in the aftermath of his amazing rescue of them all from centuries of slavery and suffering in Egypt.

The people of Israel simply said, "The Lord hates us..."

I mean!! You'd hardly believe it.

Except that I see it and hear it so often myself. The victim mentality. And I'd suggested the victim mentality's bound up with years of enslavement.

Enslavement. And here she was again, this afternoon, with her dream and the picture she had of a person enslaved.

More than that, I'd met, before she spoke with me, I'd met with Douglas once again for lunch. And had the time of prayer as well we always have.

I'd asked him to pray in regard to an awkward, problematic situation that we have. Which I'm struggling to see how I can ever resolve. Douglas doesn't really know the half of it, so he's sort of praying 'blind', as it were, half the time.

And as he prayed he used these terms, this very self-same image, of a man who acts and works, not as a freedman and as a free son of the Lord, but as a slave.

It was like God himself gave him that precise picture, those specific, particular words, so that I would get the message. So that I'd be given the key to see what's going on.

Between the prayer and the dream, it was like God spoke. Made clear just what the nature of the problem that I'm facing is and how it's to be tackled.

There's a need, I'm now sure, for a fresh and mighty release of the great and delivering power of God. To set the slaves free.

And then the painful process, over who knows just how many years maybe, the long and paiinful process of replacing that mentality with something wholly new. The mindset and perspective of the free man.

In terms of the work that God's doing here, I began to see that maybe I, like Moses (I love making these huge and crazy comparisons, it sounds quite good!), will never actually enter into that whole realm of promise where he's leading us: maybe I'll no longer be around when that new thing I've dreamed of long enough at last is brought to pass.

Maybe my whole business is the raising up among God's people here, raising up a whole new generation who no longer have the mindset of the slave, but revel in the freedoms they've been given by the Lord.

Maybe it takes a whole generation to be rid of the stains and the scars of enslavement.

There are days like this when God seems to speak in a quite remarkable way.

He gives me dreams, and today it was as if he put me on the spot about those dreams. Through Emma, the student at Reading. Not that she'd have known she was the mouthpiece of the Lord!

And then he used that three-fold combination of the word that he had given me on Sunday past, the dream this girl was given while away from here on holiday last week, and the image Douglas found himself depicting as he prayed.

Like he said, that's the nub of the matter!

It doesn't solve the problem that I face. But it helps me understand the better what I think is going on. And maybe, too, it shows me how the thing can be resolved.