OQTGLNQVS4Just woke up from a dream that had a couple I know personally in it. They are going through a time of discipline but haven’t figured it out yet. In the dream they had some sort of store dedicated to secret communications – the stuff they were selling was vile and was only supposed to be bought by people who were “in the know” – but the stuff they were selling was defiled, things that should not be eaten, much less bought. To say that something about that place wasn’t “kosher” was an understatement – even though this couple does eat according to Leviticus 11. So right away I knew that this dream had nothing to do with actual food – very much like Peter’s Acts 10 vision that used food to talk about people. Well, except of course my dream isn’t anywhere near as earth-shattering or important as Peter’s vision for a great many obvious reasons.

There were a lot of customers in that place considering there was nothing in there worth eating, not for anyone. Even the descriptions on the packaging would keep just about anyone (who wasn’t literally starving to death) at bay. Monkey pastries and caterpillar delicacies – dang.

As I walked to the back of the store I found the family on the floor trying to identify where the “fish smell” was coming from. They were convinced that it came from below the house. And yes, there was a fish smell but it wasn’t coming from below because I took a quick sniff at the gaps in the floorboards and compared to the air around me, it smelled pretty neutral.

Not three feet away, however, was their toilet – crammed to the top with feces and they couldn’t care less (even though they were aware of it and everyone who cared to look could see it). They were focused on what smelled fishy.

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First, I want to share how I got the interpretation. Unlike Moses, God doesn’t speak with me face to face as He would with a friend, whenever I get a dream it is full of riddles. My dreams are always full of puns and idioms, they just are, and it is fun to unravel them – usually. The #1 thing in dream interpretation is to consider the audience – which is why I put no stock in dream books because each person is unique in what certain things mean to themselves. I dream from the context of my own life, which is also why I am hesitant about interpreting other people’s dreams. I am not a Joseph! (Or a Peter..)

So, my friends were selling secret information but it was so defiled that no one who was following God’s laws should have been able to get past the packaging. The description itself should have kept them a mile away. In other words, idiomatically – no one who keeps Torah should have ever bought it in the first place or even spent time considering it.

As I got deeper and deeper in, my friends were on the ground searching for the source of the fishy smell and yes, there was a slight fishy odor but it was not coming from where they thought it was coming from, which was below. I told them that, but they weren’t listening to me.

So here we have an acknowledgment that something really is fishy, although it wasn’t THAT fishy, I never smelled it until I got in that specific spot, but that their identification of the source was incorrect.

I have had countless dreams in my life about clogged toilets in bathrooms – when they are about me I know one thing for certain, I am not getting my issues dealt with. Bathrooms are places of purging and cleansing, and when they are not in proper working condition in a dream there is a reason for it. This toilet had a special quality to it, it looked awesome on the outside, pristine, but inside was packed almost to the brim – and they were ignoring it. Not just ignoring it though, they knew it was full but were so focused on locating the source of the smell that it seemed unimportant.

I knew one thing in my dream, neither they or I were going to be able to locate the source of whatever was fishy, the only thing we could do is smell it.

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So, this the season between Shavuot (Pentecost) and Sukkot (the Feast of Tabernacles) when I can’t even bear to look at my social media newsfeed. The frenzy, in fact, has already begun and this year in the US we have a Presidential election thrown in just to make everything worse. (This is the point where a lot of folks will stop reading and will get defensive and react, but I want you to keep reading to see the point I am trying to make in all of this – which actually isn’t about conspiracy theories, conspiracy theories are simply a common avenue of distraction from what we are called to do – which is, to prepare ourselves from the inside out. There are a great many other distractions that we deal with – like “paganism” witch hunts and so many other side issues we get hung up on.)

Isaiah 8:12-13  “Do not call conspiracy all that this people calls conspiracy, and do not fear what they fear, nor be in dread. But the Lord of hosts, him you shall honor as holy. Let him be your fear, and let him be your dread.”

This is the point where I point out that since I started noticing this in 1999, not one prediction this time of year that I have ever seen has ended up happening – and the really obvious tragedies happened without warning from anyone on social media. Of course, afterwards, they claimed to have known all about it…

Does something smell fishy? Yes, but do the people peddling all of these conspiracies know where the source of the smell is coming from? Evidently not, and in fact theories are thrown against the wall like spaghetti – but to what end? For all of the selling of this or that theory going on across the internet, the promoting of the secret information – it seems to simply be a distraction.

We are preparing to know about things that very probably can never be known with certainty, and certainly we have no power to prevent, and while we are busy making sure that our outsides look clean, we aren’t getting our issues dealt with – even when we know they exist. The lure of chasing down what smells fishy is too distracting – even more distracting an an open toilet filled to the brim with vile sewage.

We are called to prepare ourselves, first and foremost. That’s what the time in the wilderness was about, that’s what the first exile was about, and it’s also what this final exile has been about. If you want to prep and store food, that’s awesome – but if we are not spending ten times the effort and resources prepping our characters and dealing with our own issues, then we will just end up well fed corpses in the wilderness who were not prepared to be that generation which enters into the Land. I am not expecting you to believe or create any doctrine based on my dreams – heck, I don’t even do that – but we are nowhere near the end. I have seen a movement increasingly swelling to prepare the children, because I believe they will be the ones upon whom the heavy lifting falls. All of us, we are still too Egyptian with our jealousy, infighting, and outright rebellion against any manner of leadership whatsoever. Our kids have a chance to get it right, however, if we get our attitudes and distractions out of their way.

If we want to be a part of what they will be doing, we need to focus on the dirty toilet in the room, our toilet full of our own… well, I don’t really have to say it. Do we think that Yeshua wants that stuff in His face when He returns? Will He want to hear, “I was too busy telling people about things that didn’t end up happening every year, and researching a lot of things that my knowing about couldn’t change, and I didn’t spend much time preparing my own heart or my own kids to have the kind of character it will take to get through the Tribulation – actually, I spent far more time on conspiracy and controversy websites than in Your Word.”

Hmm… it just occurred to me that the couple’s children were nowhere to be seen in the dream. Considering what they were selling, I am not sure if that was a good thing or a bad thing.

Character is job #1 – and character isn’t defined by keeping the commandments any more than making a sacrifice constituted repentance. Then and now, our commandment keeping and their sacrifices were only pleasing if our hearts are right with God, and that takes a lifetime of concentrated effort and much pain in order to get right. It takes getting into the Word and allowing it to change us, it takes being willing to see our own issues, no matter how badly it hurts, and it takes the kind of person who can embrace discipline instead of blaming it on the enemy.

 

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