The next two Nuggets are a documentation of a message that God gave me recently. It is a message that I feel is for all Christians today…
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I awoke with a start. My mouth was dry, adrenaline ran through my veins, and I admit I was shaking. As the cobwebs of sleep slowly began to slip away, reality set in. I was still in my own warm bed, within the confines of my safe and comfortable room. It had been nothing but a nightmare. Or had it been a message from God?
It is rare for me to remember dreams with the clarity of this one, and I asked God if it was of Him.
His answer? Most definitely!
Wow. This has only happened a couple of times before, and it always leaves me feeling so … blessed? Loved? Honoured? Even humbled?
But God doesn’t give us dreams to make us feel good, does He? And the content of this dream was definitely not “feel good” images. He generally gives us dreams because there is something powerful He wishes to communicate. Just what did this dream mean?
At first I thought it was a warning; a warning that something bad would happen to someone in my close circle, a warning of death…To say this thought scared me would have been an understatement. After all, we were still reeling from the death of my dear mom. Surely no one else was going to be called home!
It took me a while, but after sitting down with my Bible and journal and opening my heart to God, His message to me was clear: I had to give Him the fear that this dream meant something bad for my family. I had to surrender this to Him and accept His will, no matter what transpired, ever knowing that He would carry me through whatever was on the path I would have to cross.
As soon as I surrendered my fears to Him, I was overwhelmed with the idea that this was not the meaning to my dream, that it held far more significance than this.
I opened my heart to God, and as I did, I once again saw the dream in all its clarity; only this time, I understood.
Here is what I saw:
I was in the lowest compartment of a huge aircraft. There were several others with me, and although I seemed to know them in my dream, they weren’t anyone I know on this Earth. They were urging me to go into this special compartment that was behind closed doors. They wanted me to enter with them and help them perform an autopsy on someone who had been killed. I refused, and they didn’t push me. When they went into this special room, however, I did get a brief glimpse inside. It was like those doors opened to the vast world in all its atrocities, and all I could see for as far as I could see in the distance was death and destruction. I did see the body that my friends wanted me to help them autopsy, but it was so gruesome that I turned away, sick to my stomach. I was then forced to relive that brief view in my mind’s eye as I waited for my friends… Outside those closed doors! I quickly focused on the other parts of the aircraft, breathing deeply and forcing my mind to return to what was neat and good and trustworthy.
As I relived this part of my dream, God unveiled my eyes. The aircraft was life as we know it, and what was hiding behind those closed doors was the reality of the world we live in, filled with famine, war, drought, floods, earthquakes, diseases, etc. My friends entered this room to examine what was inside, to experience the awful condition of our world, and to try to piece through and figure out what was at the root of the problems. I, on the other hand, chose to close my eyes to the problems and to focus on the relative calm all around me. It was as if closing my eyes to the chaos made me believe that it didn’t exist… But it did!
My friends emerged then. They were not critical of me, but they did talk in hushed tones about what they had experienced behind those doors. Again I tried to block it all out, and to some degree, as the group of us climbed the stairs out of this lower compartment, I succeeded. The next level of the aircraft was filled with thousands of people, all sitting in their seats, sipping drinks, watching movies and playing on their mobile devices. My first passing thought was, “Do they know what’s in that lower compartment?” But I pushed the thought aside. After all, if I was trying to forget, how could I judge them for their ignorance? And then we continued up to an upper compartment, where the pilot and his crew were busy at work.
With this scene, God revealed to me that my own complacency to the condition of the world was leading me to not care about the others who share my world either! God was showing me that my desire to not even look upon the atrocities of the world today put me in the same category as… The priest and the Levite in Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan: “By chance a priest came along. But when he saw the man lying there, he crossed to the other side of the road and passed him by. A Temple assistantwalked over and looked at him lying there, but he also passed by on the other side.” (Luke 10:31-32 NLT)!
I know this dream was given to me; yet I feel that I am not alone. So many of us who proclaim to follow Christ are pretty quick to ignore the trouble in the world. After all, it doesn’t touch us, does it? Or maybe I’m being harsh. I’m sure that after listening to the news on any given day, many of you will pray for the people you hear about who are in far away places. “Be with the Ukrainian refugees, Lord! Help them to be able to return to their homes!” But do we do anything else? Or are we content return to our lives and forget the whole thing?
God is calling us to reach out and help one another. He wants us to do everything in our power to help those who are hurting as much as we can. I, for one, am resolving to try and do just that! Will you join me?
But that was just the first two parts of my dream. Join us on Tuesday for “The Plane, Part 2”!
In His love,
Lyn
Lynona Gordon Chaffart, Speech-Language Pathologist, mother of two adult boys, Author — “Aboard God’s Train — A Journey With God Through the Valley of Cancer”, Author and Moderator for The Nugget, a tri-weekly internet newsletter, Scriptural Nuggets, a website devoted to Christian devotionals and inspirational poems, The Illustrator, a four-times-a-week internet newsletter, and the Sermon Illustrator website, all with Answers2Prayer Ministries.
(To access the entire two-part mini-series, “The Plane”, please click here!)
