Wishful dreaming
Last week, I was taking an evening nap after work. As I lay there, I had a vision. My heart and chest burned, at first with pain, and then with this sort of almost-unbearable orgasmic radiance that centered in my chest and radiated outward from there. I struggled to adjust my position or to make it go away, but it wouldn’t stop. My eyes were closed, but my field of vision filled with flames, and a loud insistent voice repeated over and over while the words appeared in flaming letters in front of me, “Numbers 119. Numbers 119.”
“All RIGHT!” I remember thinking. “I’ll LOOK it up in the Bible. I just want this to stop. I’m afraid.”
The vision and strange feeling stopped. Shortly after that….I woke up, finding myself lying on my stomach in the same position I had been during the vision, with my arms slightly asleep. I shook it off and decided that I had just had a terrifyingly vivid dream. A dream where I had the sort of strong, life-altering spiritual experience that so many people crave…but that I crave particularly right now.
Later that night, I pulled my Bible off the shelf so I could look up the passage that had been seared into my brain during the dream. Of course, if you know Scripture better than I do, you know that there is no Numbers 119. Numbers 1:19 and 11:9 are not terribly moving passages. Or passages of any interest at all to someone in spiritual crisis.
If God is out to prove Himself to me, making sense might help. Or maybe I really did have that vision, and the lack of logical sense was the message. Seems roundabout.
My subconscious likes to mess with me in these ways, and my subconscious is also a particularly pissed-off atheist.
Ruth Anne said,
January 13, 2008 at 8:59 pm
Do you mind if I offer some exegesis? First off: God left you a message in a dream. You’re in good company.
Numbers 1:19 talked about Moses doing as God commanded. [We see elsewhere where Moses did not do as God commanded...he only got to see the Promised Land, but not enter into it, because of that staff striking the rock for water more than once.]
Numbers 11:9 talked about how manna, a prefigurement of what we know is The Bread of Life, came when the dew settled. Do as God commands, settle down, eat the Bread. And it follows on the people whining and complaining, wishfully longing to return to Egypt, their site of enslavement, because the food was better. God knew better what they must dine upon: manna for you whiners!
Disregard anything here that does not comport with what your prayer time reveals.