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A Run of Crazy Dreams
Despite all the turmoil in my life at the moment, I seem to be having some precious times with God. Dreaming dreams and seeing visions...
And afterward,
I will pour out my Spirit on all people.
Your sons and daughters will prophesy,
your old men will dream dreams,
your young men will see visions. Joel 2:28 (and Acts 2:17)
As I’ve had both dreams and visions in the past week, that scripture makes me wonder whether I am in fact like a sort of Schrödinger’s man - both young and old at the same time!
My vision is of fields of long green grass, waving gently in the breeze; blue skies dotted with puffy clouds; banks of fragrant wild flowers; lofty trees providing shade alongside lazy rivers; sheep baaing and bees buzzing.
I’ve had this same vision of bucolic loveliness in my head for about as long as I’ve been a Christian; it’s a place where my mind goes to find rest away from the cares of the world, and to meet with God. In my mind, it’s closely linked with the early verses of Psalm 23:
A Transport of Delight?
As I promised, a ‘proper’ posting. And first of all, a health warning - what I am about to say may seem like, to quote George W Bush (allegedly, commenting on Donald Trump’s inauguration) ‘some weird shit’.
On Friday, finally, after more than six months of waiting, I received the telephone call I have been expecting for so long - a date for surgery to ‘fix’ my main health problem (a couple of cardiac arrhythmias) - next Tuesday (25th September), with a prior consultation on 18th September. My mental state is still a little fragile, and the suddenness of the news threw me out of the eye of the storm and back into the howling gale. The weekend wasn’t all that great, shall we say - though the church services were good!
Anyway, on Monday night, whilst I was going to sleep, but before I was really asleep, I found myself ‘elsewhere'. Suddenly I was transported in my mind to somewhere warm and semi dark, which smelt faintly sweet - like cedar wood (the smell you get when you sharpen a pencil) or cinnamon, or both - but apart from that, and that my forearms were leaning on a polished wooden surface, I know nothing about ‘where’ or ‘what’ the place was - and it really didn’t matter. Resting there, I suddenly became aware of a female figure ‘snuggling’ really close to my left-hand side, face hidden by a ‘mop’ of long, curly, brown hair, so I couldn't see her clearly. Whispered words, which I can’t remember exactly now, but the gist was a very comforting ‘We’ve got this; we’re in control; we’re looking after you and we’re going to keep you safe.’ And then I was fully awake again, and back in my own bed.
Excuses, excuses!
I have ‘neglected’ this blog for a long time. Actually, that’s not strictly true; the truth is that I have worried a lot about not posting to it; but honestly felt unable to post anything, for a variety of reasons.
First and foremost, I have been (and still am) ill, and have only limited energy and very limited powers of concentration and memory, almost all of which have had to be reserved for more basic, less ‘frivolous’, things than revealing yet more of my thoughts and feelings to the world.
Nevertheless, I have done a lot of thinking; some of it quite deep. It hasn’t all made sense, and of what made sense, I have often not been well enough to remember it, let alone write about it. And those things I have remembered, I have found that I didn’t want to share with the world - they were either too difficult, or I wasn’t sure I understood them well enough, or they were just too personal or painful. More recently though, my thoughts have begun to ‘gel’, to solidify, and to make sense...
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