How an Apocalypse Works

I want to talk briefly about the genre of eschatological apocalyptic literature and some of what it does and does not mean.

To put it simply, very simply—an apocalypse pulls back the veil between our world and God’s view of our world. Although we have a way of looking at things here, aka “the way things are”, an apocalypse reorients us to see events, governments and people more the way God sees them and so you get humans and governments described not the way they look to us but the way God sees them. An apocalypse is somewhat of an angelic guided tour through God’s view of our current reality and struggles, and will function to show us the benefits of overcoming and penalties of falling away. I guess the best way to describe what is and is not an apocalypse is by sharing a few dreams—one of which would qualify as apocalyptic but not as eschatological apocalypse as it was not about the last days and two will not, even though they have many of the same elements.

So, first dream, not a fully realized apocalypse but having the same revelatory elements and symbolic language, greatly abbreviated:

I was in church, watching myself up on stage being sexually violated by the Pastor. He looked like a monster. People were watching and throwing money at him, financially supporting his actions. (2004)

Okay, no angels in this dream but it was revelatory during a time when I felt completely rejected and abandoned by my church family after the Pastor launched a smear campaign against me, lying about the contents of a letter I had written him privately. As I mentioned, there was no angel saying anything like, “Look at this…” and there was no call for me to endure and be faithful. This was simply a dream showing me what the situation looked like from God’s point of view—with the Pastor was violating me and by continuing to pay him while knowing what was going on, the congregation as complicit. This is very simple, nothing complicated, but you needed the context of my life to understand the trial I was enduring at the time. Without the context, the dream could mean a lot of other things. It helped me to endure the abuse that God had previously told me to bear quietly. This served to show me that although it seemed like the pastor was getting away with it and maybe God was playing favorites, that nothing was further from the truth. So, although we have the over-the-top imagery of an apocalypse, it also lacks many elements you would find in an actual apocalypse. Let’s fast forward to a more recent dream during the days of social media:

I saw people slaughtering and butchering others and turning their bodies into paint. But the paint had no color, it was beige. It was lifeless. How could so much blood and violence not be obvious in the final product? (2021)

Again, no angelic figures but the symbolism is again monstrous and horrifying. That’s how symbolic language works. Are people actually doing this? No, but this is how God sees the slander going on on social media walls (which is where paint goes, right?). People are butchering one another and plastering it all over their walls and it looks absolutely normal (beige) to us and even boring when it should be horrifying. Now, without the social media context, someone might mistakenly interpret this dream in such a way as to believe that people are actually committing murder and turning the bodies (it wasn’t just the blood) into paint and we will end up with a desperately lurid conspiracy theory on our hands. But this is how God communicates in dreams. The imagery is always more severe than what we see on the surface in real life. So, this is a wake-up call to see what internet slander looks like from God’s point of view—all the gossip about other people and generally posing as something far more righteous.

This next one actually qualifies as an apocalypse, albeit a personal one and not for the world or the end times and therefore not an eschatological apocalypse. And again, without the personal context of a specific event in my life, it is meaningless. To make it easier, we were living out in the country at the time.

I was standing on my porch, with Mark, and a farmer driving an old truck was barreling onto my property, almost hit my above-ground septic tank and as he turned toward the chicken coop, I realized that he was “driving like a damned fool.” The back of his truck, I noticed, was full of dilapidated chicken coops and he dumped them unceremoniously on my property. It was then I noticed that Mark was carrying me in his arms but then I realized it was not Mark but the Lord! The farmer sped off, never even bothering to acknowledge my presence. We went over to the chicken coops, looking for anything of value but all we found was chicken…um…poop. Lots of it…I found myself on the farmer’s property and there were a lot of tourists and spectators there. Farm animals but trapped in cages. The ground wasn’t solid, but deep mud and probably manure. I saw a man and I realized he was an angel and so I asked him, “What must I do?” He told me that if I engaged the farmer that I would have to do it on his own turf and I would come out filthy but if I refrained then I would come out clean. Suddenly, I was in a house, impeccably clean and gleaming white on the inside, and in every room there were spotless white bathrooms. There were maybe five of these bathrooms—no matter where I went in the house, there was a place where I could get cleaned up and stay clean. (December 2015)

So, in this one, although it does not concern eschatological concerns (last days) it had the other trappings of an apocalypse. It had a personal encouraging encounter with Yeshua/Jesus. It had an angel giving me guidance. It had a warning of what would happen if I was not faithful to the commandment I had been given as to how to handle the situation (that I was still ignorant of in real life) and encouragement as to specific promises of what would happen if I did obey. A situation that had not happened yet (well, it had but I would be unaware for a few more hours) was being portrayed in a revelatory way where I could see how God viewed it. It functioned to let me know that I was not alone and the situation was not going unnoticed. We all need this from time to time, right?

As in any apocalypse, the oppressed have an ally in God, and the oppressors are shown to be condemned, foolish, and able to deliver nothing but chicken poop—no matter how much of a crowd they draw or how popular they are. The fact that chicken poop, in coarser language, is also a euphemism for cowardice, there’s that too. God loves a good pun and the Bible has more than one instance of a very coarse pun or rebuke (Ez 23:20, anyone?).

In context, someone had uploaded an attack video against me where they described me and my research to a “T” so that it couldn’t be anyone else, without naming me (that might be the cowardice part), and lied about my intentions in doing the research and just engaged in ruthless character assassination against me (again, delivering the chicken poop to my property). Now, without that dream, I would have retaliated and would have felt right to do so. Just being honest. And God knew it. So, like Daniel and Revelation and other apocalyptic literature, I was given God’s view of what was going on and encouragement to endure quietly with the warning that if I did not, I would come out the worse for it and if I did then I would come out squeaky clean—regardless of any short-term damage (and there was some) and inconvenience. Plus, it hurt like the dickens and was humiliating because he had a huge following and I was barely getting started in ministry.

So, when we come to Revelation, which is a full eschatological apocalypse because it goes from the immediate situation of the congregations of Asia Minor dealing with various challenges in being either persecuted by or allying themselves with Rome (and both of those are problems, they just require different responses) to future victory, we have the same things. But without context, they can easily be misinterpreted to be literal—like the locusts and the horsemen and the beasts. But how would these images have translated to the original audience that we see the letters specifically addressed to? If we don’t study the original context, we are going to go wild with a bunch of kooky interpretations that need to be revamped on a regular basis. And that’s just bad eisegesis. Fortunately, we know enough now that we can discern, in the words of one of my favorite scholars, that even a low level Roman official with mediocre intelligence could have read Revelation and understood the attacks against Rome herself and, specifically, Nero.

Taking an apocalypse too literally is to miss the point. And so is taking it out of the immediate historical reality. After all, no one drove their truck onto my property, and they didn’t actually dump a bunch of old chicken coops. I am sure the ground at their place is not literally ankle deep in mud and muck. I am sure they don’t have farm animals on display in cages. And no, I have never been on his property, nor have I even been in a house that clean with so many bathrooms. The important thing was the message, the clarification, the warning and the promise and what it meant to my walk. It was a pseudo-apocalypse for me and my promised endgame of coming out of it clean, which, even if you were one of the people watching and spreading that video around, you must know by now that I came out of the entire situation clean and unscathed and even vindicated in that research he wanted to destroy me over. The guy who did it? Not so much.

In the same way, Revelation is a message to churches in the midst of trial and temptation that no matter how things look to them on the ground now, God sees the situation differently and is calling them to endure with faithfulness and integrity and a spotless witness. And a further promise that in the future there will be vindication and victory, even if they are not alive to see it.

Can we glean and benefit from Revelation? Absolutely. Can anyone glean from the dreams I had if they are going through something similar? Absolutely. But only when not deprived of the original situational context. Otherwise, we’re going to end up with a story of nuclear weapons and apache attack helicopters and miss the point of the apocalypse entirely.

God wins. He sees the injustice. Be faithful. Endure to the end.

This is part 2 in a series on Revelation. Part 1, concerning the two witnesses is linked here.

If you read the Reading list from part 1, you can add three more books to it

deSilva, David Discovering Revelation: Content, Interpretation, Reception (Discovering Biblical Texts (DBT)) (2021)

Witherington, Ben Revelation and the End Times Participant’s Guide: Unraveling God’s Message of Hope (2010)

. —Jesus, Paul and the End of the World (1996)

Episode 60: Strokes and the Parable of the Snake Who Escaped

This broadcast is going to be very different than my usual fare. I am going to talk about what it is like to have a stroke and what it is like to be in recovery. It’s my hope that by being open and honest about the struggles that people will be able to be a better support to loved ones going through this sort of thing–be it TIA’s (transient ischemic attacks or mini-strokes), mild, moderate, or severe strokes or TBI (traumatic brain injuries).

Plus, through a parable, God taught me something incredibly important about His provision and protection and my sometimes ridiculous response to it that might amuse and maybe even edify you.

Transcript below

This week I am taking a break from recording the Gospel of Mark teachings because some things have happened and because of conversations I have been having with a surprising number of people I have decided to talk about brain damage. You know, whether you or someone you know has TIA’s (mini-strokes) or small, medium, or massive strokes or a traumatic brain injury I can do a little to kind of explain what is going on from the inside. Of course, I have never had a massive stroke or a TBI, but a lot or at least some of what is going on inside the brain during the healing process is going to be very similar, and by chronicling my healing process for this last one, and for others in the past, I have run into a lot of people who are able to understand themselves and family members for the first time because, you know, most folks don’t really want to discuss this. It’s embarrassing to admit that something is not functioning well “upstairs” although I don’t know why. Seriously, the brain can become diseased or damaged just like any other part of the body but for some reason, there is this insane double standard in believing circles that if your reproductive organs or your brain has problems then you are cursed somehow but every other organ, you’re still okay with God. Well, that’s just stupid and frankly, elitist and uneducated. I don’t generally name-call but these people who promote this are nothing but snakes and vipers in the Body, preying on those who are already physically oppressed by illness. Mental illness isn’t usually demonic either, I have to say that—the brain is an incredibly complex machine and things can legitimately get out of whack.

I had my first stroke at the age of 27, on January 7, 1997 after suffering from debilitating headaches since I was twelve years old. Because I never made more than a few days worth of progesterone (something we wouldn’t find out for a couple more decades), I was estrogen dominant (still am, actually) and that causes blood clotting. It is also one of many reasons why I could never carry a baby to term, I have multiple inoperable reproductive birth defects. So, obviously, walking around with brain damage and a barren womb means God hates me and only loves people without any brain damage and a ton of kids, right? Not really. Although to hear some people talk, if I was fool enough to believe them, you’d sure think so.

But, that first stroke was a shock. I was at work (and this is before I was a believer), total type A personality. I mean, I was so “type A” that I was working in Aerospace R&D at the age of twenty-two and was running my own small-batch department when I was only twenty-three. I had graduated early from UCD with a degree in Chemistry. I was scary smart and scary driven to succeed. I was also not a believer until I was twenty-nine years old so all that drive and determination and those brains were certainly not going to use for the sake of the Kingdom, I can tell you. But that first stroke, it was a pretty bad one. What I’d call a medium stroke now. Some of the side effects lasted for twenty years—the last bit of paralysis lasted until the summer of 2017 when I finally regained the ability of my brain to fully communicate entire words to my hands. I would start writing out a word and my hand would stop writing about halfway through even though my brain kept spelling it out. Very frustrating. But I remember right after I had that stroke, and I was at work—I had right-side paralysis. I couldn’t feel the skin on the right-hand side of my body. I was scratching madly at the right side of my face with my left hand desperately trying to feel pain, to feel anything. The paralysis and lack of feeling are unpleasant, but compared to what is going on inside the brain it’s really only an inconvenience, at least it was for me. Imagine being on a freeway and there is all the regular traffic—but there is an accident. A big one. That’s what a blood clot in the brain is like, and a bad one shuts things down for a long enough time that the damage becomes more and more permanent. Small clots mean a short accident clean up time and the damage can almost always be entirely undone—but between the small and the large clots (or multiple clots) there is a lot of— (dangit, I give up trying to finish this sentence, stroke brain lol–and then worse than that, when I recorded this I couldn’t finish ie either lol)

But, the symptoms can vary a lot from very mild annoyances to severe life interruptions. With the medium stroke, and because this was my first one and I didn’t have God with me (I didn’t think I did, anyway), I was terrified all the time. My brain was like that freeway with a huge pile-up and things were getting cleaned up but there was a lot of damage. Normal traffic is jammed up, some of it. But some of it can also be rerouted, you know? But the point is that the information isn’t going the way it normally goes and so that results in things taking a lot longer. Some functions just can’t be rerouted, they are stuck there until everything is totally clear again and sometimes that just never happens. Other stuff, well, I will tell you the story of when Mark and I drove down from Idaho to Zion National Park and Bryce Canyon National Park last October.

So, we are heading down and BOOM I-15 at Layton is all torn up on the southbound lane. I am driving and Mark is sleeping. It makes it easier for him to cope with my driving. And so all the traffic gets diverted onto other roads, detoured. But we aren’t talking about a frontage road experience here. It turned all the heck over the place and I don’t naturally have a great sense of direction but I know we weren’t just heading south. And, you know, you are just craning your head and hoping not to miss other detour signs because sometimes they had us turning right and other times left and it was a mess and it took a long time to get back onto I-15. And I was anxious and sweating bullets and concerned about getting lost. That’s your brain after a stroke. And you can get lost. You can run into a roadblock and get stuck. But hopefully, there is just a long detour.

So, the brain is frustrated, and the brain is scared and confused. It’s just an organ. It isn’t who we are, it’s just the organ that our soul thinks with. That’s how I have come to look at it. That’s why smart people aren’t more precious to God than people who aren’t so smart—because the soul is separate from the brain. But just like the soul can’t walk on crippled legs, it also can’t think properly with a damaged brain.

The end result is that the brain becomes overwhelmed and paranoid. I need people to understand this for the sake of themselves and the sake of their loved ones going through this. Learning not to give in to that paranoia took me many years of hard work, working with God. Without Him, I don’t know what I would have done—but I didn’t have Him the first time and I had nothing to gauge my experiences next to. I didn’t know anyone who had suffered a stroke that wasn’t permanent and catastrophic. We hear the horror stories, you know? No one talks about how many people are out there recovering from small strokes, or that even with a moderate stroke you can recover some semblance of a normal life. But I sat on the couch staring at the wall for a long time after they laid me off at work. I couldn’t remember the names of the employees on my shift whom I had known for years. I couldn’t make decisions. I was exhausted all the time because my brain was just so busy healing. I have to say that at this point that we didn’t know for a couple of months that I had had a stroke—in the ER that night they diagnosed me with a panic attack and it wasn’t until my workplace sent me to a neuropsychologist that we found out I had significant left lobe brain damage. The staff on-site didn’t think a twenty-seven-year-old woman could have had a stroke so they didn’t even check—despite my blood pressure being 245/147 when I was admitted into the ER and I had just been prescribed birth control pills that had caused severe estrogen cascading and blood clotting (we still wouldn’t know about my progesterone problems for three more years).

After a while, I did get back to work but the problems with my brain, some of them were permanent. My personality somewhat changed. I was no longer Type A (probably a good thing). I also wasn’t nearly as intelligent as I once was. I could feel how hard it was to solve problems compared to before—it’s still harder. I never appreciated what kind of mind I had. Don’t get me wrong, I still qualify as gifted, but now I am probably at the low end of that range and not the higher end. The point is that I can’t mentally do the same things I used to do. I have learned to accept that and have adapted to it. Really, it doesn’t affect normal life so who cares, right?

But it took me a long time to learn to cope and to slow down. You still want to go fast because, on the inside, you are still the same soul you were before, but you have to adapt to a new reality. It can make you really angry.

But I want to talk about the paranoia. Your brain isn’t your soul. It doesn’t understand, doesn’t have an awareness of why it isn’t working properly. It’s clever enough to try to compensate where it can, but the brain is not a reasoning entity, it’s just a thinking computer. Our brains need us to reign them in and to speak comfortingly to them. Our brains need to be reassured that they don’t need to function perfectly right now and that they need to heal, that they need to be patient and adapt. That’s what people don’t understand about what it is like to have a stroke, either from the inside or from the outside. Brains have to be comforted and reassured and treated with kid gloves when they are damaged. The time for being challenged is in the future when healing starts taking place and we need to see what has improved and what hasn’t. But the worst thing we can do when someone has suffered a stroke or a TBI (traumatic brain injury) is to behave as though nothing has happened. No, you don’t want to baby yourself or the other person, but you have to be smart and compassionate and there have to be some serious reality checks. Most things, in my experience, heal but not everything, and nothing is ever entirely as it was again unless there is divine healing.

Fortunately, our worth isn’t tied to how well our brains function any more than it is tied to the viability of our reproductive organs. Or any other organs for that matter! We have to learn to see the difference between ourselves and the shells God designed for us to live in.

So, I found out right away that I couldn’t drive anywhere even once the paralysis was getting better. Why? Well, my brain wasn’t healthy enough yet to deal with all of the input. Think about how much attention to how many things are required to drive a car. Not only do you have to manually just drive the car (and I was driving a stick shift back then), but you have to pay attention to the road and to any possible distractions or dangers. The brain-damaged by a stroke and even by a small one, can’t process that much information. So the brain starts freaking out and that freaking out causes paranoia. The brain doesn’t want you involved in such a complicated activity and so it is going to start messing with you. I remember driving through the neighborhood (remember that this was before I was diagnosed) and I was absolutely 100% sure that there were people ducked down in the cars alongside the road who were going to suddenly swerve into me. Absolutely certain. Oddly enough, I believe my brain was simply trying to get me to stop driving. I’ll never know for sure. But when I have strokes and I try to do my normal routine, the same thing always happens. I have learned coping mechanisms but I have also learned to respect my brain telling me that we just can’t do this right now. It’s not about giving in to paranoia, it’s about having a healthy respect for why my brain is doing all it can to induce that sort of irrational fear. I have to see what is behind the fear, the reality of just being impaired for a while and know that the impairment will pass and I can do whatever needs to be done in the future—or maybe recognize that it really can just slide for a while—or someone else can do it for a change.

But I have learned not to be hard on myself or to consider myself to be useless or hopeless or stupid or cursed or whatever.

I have a physical problem that causes my blood to clot, actually there are quite a few underlying causes. I have learned to compensate for some of them. I have learned to not eat meat and milk within four hours of each other and, because that can be so difficult, in January I just stopped eating dairy at all. I take aspirin and turmeric, and I have a special medication that opens up the blood vessels in my brain so that when I do clot, they are more likely to pass through than to cause problems. And then sometimes doing these things just isn’t enough—like last month and we still aren’t sure what happened after going fifteen months without anything more than the two TIA’s that were my own fault because I made some mistakes in my self-care. Fortunately, those only last for up to 24 hours and then are gone like they never even happened. This is my life—we all have something, right? This is just a bit more dramatic than some other things but nothing has ever really kept me from serving God. What it does do is give other people the chance to serve God by caring for me when I am going through this.

I think that is just something we miss because we don’t like feeling as though we are burdens. My infirmities are chances for those around me to be sheep instead of goats. Are they going to shun me and consider me to be stricken (man, that sounded like Isaiah 53 which should never be applied to me) by God or are they going to see me as an opportunity to serve God by taking care of me when I am down for the count? Our job in this life, our purpose for being here, isn’t just to be on top and taking care of everyone else but also to set an example by humbly allowing others to care for us when we need it. How else will they learn to be other-centered if we stubbornly refuse to allow them to assist us when we need it?

Look, people who have had strokes aren’t stupid or insensible. We can be hurt. We can feel love. We can be scared and we can feel safe. We can feel overwhelmed and we can be restful. You know—just like everyone else. Just because our inside thoughts might not be able to manifest in concrete action on the outside doesn’t mean there isn’t a thinking human being inside. Sometimes our thoughts are normal and just don’t make their way to the surface. We might tell ourselves to walk down the hall but we don’t know where the wall is because our vision centers aren’t quite copacetic. That’s why I am generally bruised up and down one side or the other after a stroke. The parts of us that can walk might be just fine but we don’t quite have a good bead on where our body is with respect to the corner of the wall. Maybe our long, medium or short-range vision is impaired. Maybe our hands aren’t cooperating with our brains. You see, it all depends on where the clot happened. I have never been unable to type, and I thank God for that mercy. That would be hard for me. Sometimes my ability to think as clearly about what to write might be impaired, but I can always at least express what I am thinking. Just sometimes my thoughts aren’t always so inspirational or organized as usual.

Anyway, I really hope this helps people to sort of relate to a loved one who is trapped inside a system that isn’t really working for them anymore, or is going through it themselves. You aren’t worthless—they aren’t worthless. It just takes time and a need and a willingness to adapt and just accept what cannot be changed, or cannot be changed right now. If we handle it right, we will never have a better opportunity to grow in our relationship with God because there are very few times when we are more vulnerable than after a stroke. We have no choice but to lean on God and lean on others. If we can accept it with humility, it is fertile soil for growing good fruit and developing compassion. If we wallow in bitterness and anger, it can be the worst thing to ever happen to us. But it is wonderful, in the aftermath of a stroke, learning who our God really is. Until something terrible happens, His goodness is nothing to us except theoretical.

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I truly hope that this will be an encouragement to someone.

The Parable of the Snake who Escaped

Sometimes I dream in parables and they take me a few days to figure out. This is no exception.

Last week I had a dream about being in the wilderness with my husband and some others. And there were vipers everywhere–specifically, copperheads.

When I say they were everywhere, I am not exaggerating. I mean, I am not talking Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark pit full of cobras all laying on top of each other everywhere (I mean, what did they eat down there anyway? Not like mice would be stupid enough to go down there, but I digress). But it was quite the accomplishment to avoid them and because they were the same color as the ground, there was that additional challenge as well.

I went to the garage (yes, there was a garage in the wilderness–this was a dream, not a documentary) and tried to round up axes so that we could all chop up the snakes. But when I came back, my husband tells me that he has taken care of 99% of the copperheads. They were gone, which I took to mean as being dead.

What was my response?

Was I thrilled that 99% were gone? Was I rejoicing? Was I complimenting him on a job well done?

Nope, I was freaking out because of the snake who escaped while my husband tried to show me that my bed was free of them, anyway.

It’s funny now, a few days later, but I had to go through a few days to see what was going on. You probably already got the punch line because, like our forays into the Gospel, you had a narrator giving you some important prompts. The disciples, on the other hand, experienced Yeshua’s/Jesus’s ministry without a narrator and I experienced that dream the same way.

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So, I woke up and groaned. “Oh, no.”

You see, God has been giving me heads up dreams for the last sixteen years whenever I was about to be betrayed or go through a terrible trial instigated by someone else’s treachery. In those dreams, there are always three things in common (1) the presence of my husband or another male authority figure whom I trust, (2) a terrible disaster, which comes in the form of an attack (the first time it was a nuclear explosion which is a good way to describe what ended up happening in real life), and (3) I am kept supernaturally safe, although I have to live through the consequences of the attack.

So, I figure this is one of those. Immediately, that’s where my mind went. And I waited. And nothing happened. And, usually, something generally happens in fairly short order.

So, I took my interpretation of the dream back to the drawing board, and although something might still be in the wings, another attack/betrayal that I have to endure quietly while God keeps me safe and deals with it Himself–and well, I started looking at it again.

Obviously, my husband was representative of God as a protector and provider in my life. I figured that one out years ago when these dreams started happening. I had assumed I would be facing a trial where God took care of 99% of the fallout, maybe, or protected me from 99% of the incoming attacks.

But the use of the one hundred and the ninety-nine–it occurred to me that there were parallels with the parable of the Lost Sheep and how all of Heaven rejoiced when just one lost sheep was found. And here I was, full of anxiety when just one snake escaped! How much greater would the rejoicing in Heaven be if ninety-nine lost sheep were found? How thrilled I should be, then, that I am protected from the ninety-nine and only one solitary percent of the snakes remained?

Once I figured it out, I just burst out in laughter–mostly at myself and my anxiety-riddled mindset. If I had lived with that sort of fear of copperheads when we lived in Missouri, I wouldn’t have ever left the house, much less gone trampling around our thirty-three acres. I assumed the worst–just like in my dream.

In fact, God was reaching back sixteen years and showing me something about every single one of the dream series that I had missed (with the exception of one time about five years ago). The point of the warning dreams wasn’t in the warning–it was in the assurance that I would be divinely protected. We are all going to go through trials and betrayals, every single one of us. Sure, yours might not be as public as some of mine have been, but we all endure such things. But, looking back, how have you been carried, shielded, and protected from what the consequences would have been otherwise?

There are people in our lives who are going to do their best to harm us. God doesn’t stop people from sinning when they really have their hearts set on it–and even with believers, sometimes their agendas and pride and bad fruit just blind them to what they are really doing and how destructive they are being to the Kingdom. But that doesn’t mean that He leaves us at the mercy of wolves–or vipers. I can’t think of any betrayal or attack I have faced that couldn’t have been a hundred times worse. Looking back, it is obvious that I am protected–not from the initial attack but from the severity of what the long-term consequences could have been under different circumstances.

But all these dreams and all these betrayals–I had to allow God to handle them and to refuse to lash out publicly. I have found that He does not protect me from the consequences of my interfering with what He is doing in the midst of a crisis when He has warned me to just trust Him and be silent. I made the mistake, once, of not doing that and I found out very quickly that people are much more apt to side with the villain when the victim (of a non-criminal offense, but just sin) starts making a big fuss and starts throwing a monkey wrench into established relationships. It’s not logical and it isn’t right but it is true. People want your problems to remain your problems.

All of that is why He showed me that there were no snakes in my bed. He needed to show me that I could rest in His deliverance and not worry about the snake who escaped His wrath. It needed to be out there, and I needed to know it was there so that I would remember to cling to Him but focusing on it rather than the ninety-nine was one huge mistake.

Have a great week.

Sure, something smells fishy – but what are conspiracy theories distracting us from?

Just 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.

Practical Dream Interpretation Pt 3: Dreams that show us that it’s time for a major change

Still editing the book (halfway through the final edit) and so I am publishing from my emergency reserve – the blogs that come from weeks when I write three but only want to publish one or two.

My son Matthew came to me with this dream yesterday morning and I was thrilled because it’s just a classic, straightforward communication from the Spirit (indeed, personal correction is, I find, the most common communication from the Spirit). I immediately knew what it meant and was able to relay that to him.

Why? Because I’ve had the same sort of dream many times and it always leads to something amazing. This is the sort of dream where, if we respond correctly, our lives will take a new and positive direction.

In the dream, Matthew walked into his bathroom and closed the door. It was dark but when he flipped on the light nothing happened. He tried everything he could but to no avail – he was totally in the dark.

I know, you’re either saying, “Big deal,” or you’re jumping up and down because you’ve had the same dream or something similar. It’s one of the most common types of dreams, as well as one of the best.

In dreams, bathrooms will often show us our spiritual state. The filthier the bathroom, the more work that needs to be done. Sometimes the bathroom will be filled with other people’s messes – which can either mean that we are inappropriately cleaning up after someone or that there are places of wounding in our lives, damages caused by someone else, that need to get cleaned up. In this case, Matthew didn’t notice anything about the bathroom so the cleanliness was not an important element.

Bathrooms, as I intimated above, are the places where we get cleaned up – but what happens when we are in the dark? Simply put, it means that there is something that needs to be taken care of but that we can’t see it ourselves no matter how hard we try. This is a special revelation from God that He is going to have to step in and reveal something that we generally don’t want to know about ourselves. We all have these sorts of disconnects in our lives where we think we are hot stuff and we end up being kind of a hot mess instead.

The advice I gave Matthew is this – pray for that revelation no matter how much it hurts or how embarassing it might be. Being given the gift of seeing a truth about himself so young is an opportunity I never had. I was twenty nine before I started having such dreams, and he is being blessed at fourteen. I also told him that when he finds out what the character flaw is, to not ignore it or turn his back on it – God only shows us things about ourselves when we are mature enough to get it dealt with and at the moment when He is most willing to work with us on it. Unlike people, who don’t wait for the most opportune time but generally spring as soon as they are irritated enough, God patiently waits until the perfect opportunity.

Matthew prayed the prayer and last night he had another dream which gave him another piece of the puzzle, encouraging him to pray again for the full understanding of what in his life needs cleaned up.

You know, God loves it when we respond to His promptings and even though it is painful when we are being shown our faults, Matthew is really encouraged by the fact that the Spirit really is communicating with him. He has always wanted this to happen, and now he is learning the benefits as well as the price of hearing from God. He’s discovering that the Spirit is a whole lot more about correcting us than showing us cool stuff.

I will add that I had one of these very dreams just last night, but in the middle of it I realized I was dreaming. There was a person there that I could actually talk to and so I said, “Please, tell me what’s wrong with me, whatever it is, I don’t care. I am willing to do anything to fix this.” I don’t remember what he told me, although I listened intently in the dream, but upon awaking i had a deeper understanding of why I do certain things and why that needs to change. Painful, but good. The bathroom in my dream was spotless – in fact it was a house full of practically spotless bathrooms, I was the one who needed cleaned up on the outside. It’s a good thing to know, in this life, what can be fixed while there is still time to do so.

Relational Sanity Pt 10: Moving the destroyers out of your line of sight

Woke up from an amazing dream.

I started out in a bad place in the dream, although to be fair, it wasn’t ever supposed to be a bad place but instead a sanctuary of rest. In it were people from my life in the past and present. You know, the kind of people who have or presume authority but often lack good character?

It was time to leave a this place (it was like a rental cabin, not someplace anyone is supposed to actually live forever), but a ton of work had to be done first as there were things to clean up and things to sort through in order to find out what was good, what was bad, what belonged to me and what belonged to others – but there was a sense of being pressed for time as it was time to go. I knew that if I left the place uncleaned, it would be someone else’s problem. In the midst of this, one of the biggest challenges was the critical people who have been in my life. These are the types of people who apply pressure and never let up, who misrepresent situations because of ignorance and refuse to be corrected or educated about the things they are talking about as though just the fact that a thought popped into their heads made it true and needful of being spoken. I saw people who had betrayed me, long forgiven but whom I still grieve over. These people, throughout the dream, did absolutely nothing to help but only to hinder. I am cleaning – people who aren’t cleaning give me grief. I find a woman’s purse out on the property and try to return it, someone snatches it away and expresses disapproval – not that they want to keep the purse, but they simply are irritated that I am pausing in my cleanup (that they are not helping with) to see that something is restored to someone else. Someone else is blocking my view of the person who I need to speak to (and who has asked me to speak).

So what did I do? I cleaned anyway, I labored to return the purse anyway, and I stepped forward until the man who was blocking my sight was out of my line of sight.

Those of you who are familiar with my house dreams will see a recurring theme – whenever I am in a new phase of my life, I move into a new house in my dream and that house always needs to be cleaned of other people’s stuff. This was the first time in a long time that some of the stuff was actually mine, stuff that needed to be kept and other stuff that could be tossed. What I couldn’t do was just leave it behind for someone else to clean up – it did have to be dealt with. Too much of my own life has been spent dealing with the garbage that others left behind for me to deal with – it’s time to break that cycle. This is my third such dream in two months, three new houses and so things are changing at a rapid pace.

My house dreams – always cleaning up the mess that other people have left in my life that is holding me back and from dealing with the things that need to be overcome. In the past, I was only having to deal with the stuff because the old owners were long gone. This dream was different – relatives and a former ministry leader were there. Although some relatives were there in the house I was trying to get cleaned up, hampering me, and keeping me from returning to someone else what was theirs for no reason other than to have the illusion of control – it was the former ministry leader who was in my way of seeing the person I needed to talk to so I could address a gathered crowd about a problem. By walking forward, and putting him out of my line of sight, I was able to see the person I was addressing and I gave this stunningly brilliant speech that concerned the giving of loans to the poor but OF COURSE I can’t remember a word of it, only the topic, so even though it was brilliant I can’t remember any of it so it was totally wasted on my dream audience. Figures. LOL. I will probably never know what I said or even say it in broad daylight. Bah humbug….. it is not the first time this has happened. I should imagine we have all had such dreams where we do something amazing but alas – no witnesses!

The moral of the dream? People from your past often don’t want your life cleaned up – they want you to be that person they used to be able to control, keep down, discourage, frighten, misrepresent, judge, and get in the way of. They want to be better than you, more spiritual than you, able to pretend that you are still that ‘messed up’ person who they criticized, slighted, kept from doing what is right, got in the way of or betrayed. It’s the crab bucket mentality – live crabs in a bucket who try to escape will be pulled back in by crabs beneath them and it works with humans too. Oftentimes the very people who should want us to succeed the most really don’t want us to – they want us to be the people they look down on, or feel better than. Some people need that – they need to critique, judge, control, and get in your way – because if you move past them, they may have to turn around in order to really see you. Turning around (Hebrew “teshuva”) is symbolic of repentance, and in my dream, when I moved forward so that the one who betrayed me was out of my line of sight, even he had to turn in order to see me and he clapped along with everyone else at my speech. Dang it, what did I say anyway??

So pay attention to the direction that people are facing when they oppose you – as well as the direction you are facing. Sometimes opposition is a good thing – not everything we do should go unopposed – but when we are in fact truly cleaning up our lives (as opposed to trying to forcibly clean up everyone else’s life), truly doing good towards others (for their sake and not for show), or truly moving forward (when invited) then anyone opposing us is facing in the wrong direction.

Oh, the woman who lost her purse? It isn’t uncommon for people to lose their identity in the midst of critical, controlling and treacherous people – being restored and then restoring others is some of the purest work within the Kingdom.

Flip side of that – who in our own lives do we want to keep in that place where they were when they were abusive to us? How often do we truly want them to repent and be restored and to get cleaned up, and how often do we secretly (or not so secretly) want them to die evil so they can be banned from the Kingdom? Do we stand in public, scream and point at them until everyone hates them? While we look out for the people who are unrighteously standing in our way (as opposed to the ones who are righteously standing in our way), it is equally important to look and make sure that we aren’t unrighteously standing in the way of someone else (Warning: at first and easiest glance, we will always assume that we are righteously standing in someone else’s way). That’s tough, that requires real love – to want restoration for those who have sinned against you and have not repented, who in fact show zero remorse, oftentimes because they do not question their own actions. Not questioning our own rightness is an epidemic in the Body – and it is probably the most valuable thing we can do in the service of others.