A Beautiful Promise...

A Beautiful Promise...
"For as the soil makes the sprout come up
and a garden causes seeds to grow,
so the Sovereign LORD will make righteousness
and praise spring up before all nations."
Isaiah 61:11

Thursday, December 31, 2015

A Dream on New Year’s Eve

I woke up this New Year’s Eve morning after having a dream.  In the dream I was asked to speak at a conference.  It was a real honor to be there with so many highly educated people.  But while we were there a bunch of troubled kids, orphans and foster kids, came in and were stealing our things as we participated in the conference.  Somehow, I ended up walking in on them stealing from us.  At first I was really mad.  My anger seemed to have no effect on these kids.  They didn’t care that I was mad; they didn’t even seem to care that I had caught them.  And then they had a song that they sang, and I don’t remember all the lyrics, but it was about all of the advantages that I had in life that they didn’t have: education, connections, money, opportunity, and the things that separate the people who succeed in society from the people who don’t; the things that separated me from them.  There was one line in the song about grace, about how all of these social advantages that I had paid the price for grace in our society.  Because I am educated, I get opportunities.  Because I have money or connections I get things in society that they don’t.  There is no grace for them because it is assumed that if they mess up it’s because they intend to. The hammer comes down harder on them than it ever would on me. 

At that moment, I felt that the Lord opened my eyes and showed me that each of these kids had been hurt… mainly by parents.  Some of them had been abandoned, or intentionally hurt, or abused, or just didn’t have parents at all.  I felt like God showed me that he is our heavenly Father, and he has a love that will never disappoint them, will never let them down, will never hurt them.  Also, that he is the only one who can heal them, and that his grace is completely free and is given equally to everyone who follows him.  Then I felt like God said, “You need to tell them about me.” 

Somehow, I got them all to sit down, and I was able to meet them where they were at, being honest about where I was at: I am educated, I have a loving family, I’ve never gone through a lot of the things that they have gone through.  But, I still have hurt in my life and that hurt affects the way I interact with others.  Then I got to tell them who God is: that he loves them enough to not leave them where they are.  That he is the perfect Father who will never hurt them, will never leave them or abandon them, and that his grace is free. When we mess up, he loves us enough to not leave us there in our mistakes.  He loves us enough to changes us, and give us his Holy Spirit, and make us new.

Then I got to tell them that for some reason God chooses to demonstrate his love for us through each other.

In some way, each of us can relate to one of the positions in this dream.  Honestly, each of us at least started out like the kids in this dream; maybe we’re still like them.  Either way, we need to decide what we’re going to do about it.  If we are following Christ, God wants to use us to show his love to those around us.  There are so many people who don’t yet know him; people that he loves dearly, lives he wants to change.  We need to be obedient to God.  Who are we sharing him with this year?  Who’s life does he want to touch through us?  In what ways do we need to submit to him by obeying the call to share his truth with others? 


Happy New Year!  Let’s make it count for God’s kingdom! 

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