Swedish Fish & my dream journal (ignore the date!)

I had a strange dream.  I guess that’s an obvious statement since dreams are almost always strange.  I have been keeping a dream journal since the end of August, and two of my books have the word Dreams in the title (Laughing in My Dreams and Dancing in My Dreams).  I don’t dream every night (at least I don’t remember dreaming every night), and not all dreams are from God.  But I’m trying to remember my dreams and write them down before they fade away, in an effort to understand the workings of my own mind better.

God-given dreams are always memorable.  God often speaks to people through dreams:

For God does speak—now one way, now another—though no one perceives it.  In a dream, in a vision of the night, when deep sleep falls on people as they slumber in their beds, He may speak in their ears and terrify them with warnings.  Job 33:14-16

So here is the dream I had, I call it Sprouting Branches:

I was visiting a resort, and after a day there, I started to sprout thin branches like a tree or a vine.  I was embarrassed and didn’t want my family to know, so I tried to hide my sprouts.  Then a family member confided to me that she had begun to grow roots, and she showed them to me.  They looked like my branch sprouts, but came off of her feet and ankles and went down, whereas mine came off my torso and arms and went up.  She wanted to cut off the roots so that she could continue to move about freely.  I wondered if cutting them off would hurt, but I didn’t really consider cutting off my branches.  Then as I was walking toward a building, a nice young man held the door open for me.  He smiled at me and said (as if he knew about my hidden sprouts), “It’s OK, everybody in here has them.”

Then I woke up, and immediately I understood that the young man was Jesus, and that the door was a symbol of the Rapture.  Then I fell back asleep and the dream continued:

I was in a car full of people, and we were going around, picking up sprouted people.  We were going to take them to a class that would explain to all of us what was going on with the sprouting.

When I prayed about this dream, I had a couple of Rapture verses in mind, but God gave me 1 Thessalonians 4:13:

Since we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so, through Jesus, God will bring with Him those who have fallen asleep.

The Bible often uses the term “fallen asleep” when speaking of His people to mean that they have died.  I hadn’t thought of it before reading this verse, but I think the people who were growing roots had died.  Perhaps the sprouting people were dying, though I don’t really think so because I was sprouting, and thanks be to God, I enjoy perfect health.

So then after church yesterday I went to eat a late lunch at (of all places!) Church’s (get it?  after church, I went to eat at Church’s)—a fried chicken fast food place.  They were short-handed, and the kid at the counter was having a lot of trouble taking orders because he was unfamiliar with the register.  So the service was lamentably slow, and many customers were unhappy both with the slowness and with the orders being filled incorrectly.

One lady there had a tiny baby in a carrier and three very active children: a little girl about three years old, and two boys, about seven and eleven years old.  She had left the children seated at a table, guarding her purse.  As time dragged on, the children found it harder and harder to stay in their seats, especially with grandma at the counter, and distracted from them.  Every so often the grandmother would holler at the kids to “pipe-down and behave yourselves!”  Although they were active, they were well-behaved.

The oldest boy had a soft bag about the size of a lunchbox slung across his shoulders.  He was standing near me, looking into the bag when a flash of light came from the bag, surprising both of us.  He looked up, blinked a couple of times, and grinned at me.  I grinned back and said, “Did you just take your picture?”  He laughed and said, “Naw, it was just the flash.”  A few minutes later, he carefully took the large camera out of the bag, aimed the flash, and tried to take the baby’s picture.  The flash didn’t go off this time, and I don’t know if he got her picture or not.  He carefully put the camera back into the bag and closed the hasp.

A few minutes later the boy with the camera bag approached me and gave me a packet of candy: Swedish Fish, which are like gummy bears.  I thanked him and we exchanged smiles.  I finished my meal about the same time that the grandmother finally got her order.  She gathered her children and went out to the parking lot.  The boy with the camera bag held the door open for his little sister, who had run back in to get her grandmother’s purse.  He saw that I had cleared my table, and waited, holding the door open for me, too.  I thanked him and again we exchanged smiles.

This boy was unusually conscientious and polite, and generous to give me some of his candy just because we had shared that funny moment with  his flash.  As I got into the car, I remembered the nice young man from my dream, and thought about the similarity of this experience to that dream.

There are some people who are hostile to Christians, and I’m not an underground Christian at all.  But even though there may be hostile attitudes from time to time, I know that God loves me.  I know that He will hold the door open for me, welcoming me into Heaven when the time comes.  God is good!