Sunday Afternoon Tea - Which window am I looking through?

 

I love the advice Corrie Ten Boom's father gave her about facing her fears.  He told  her (at least at that time in history) one does not purchase a ticket for the train until they need to ride on that train.  He said that, like the ticket, God gives us the grace we need at the time we need it.

She would write that she found great truth in that when she went through the horrors of a Nazi concentration camp and the years leading up to her arrest.  I expect what she went through was worst than her previous fears would even anticipate but God's grace did bring her through it and she went on to touch millions of lives with her testimony.

Of course, not everyone survived to tell about their experiences.  Sometimes God uses the difficult times to bring His people home.  Her much beloved sister died not too long before the camp was liberated.  Corrie had to come to terms with faith and grace and forgiveness and other emotions that only the Holy Spirit within could teach her in the years after the war.

I had been listening to some speculation early last week about what is happening in the world today and I went to bed one night more tense about the future than usual.  Then God spoke to me through a dream.  I've had such dreams before that I knew was from Him but not for a long time.

In the dream, it felt like my house was in a large earthquake. The shaking was so intense that the dishes in the china cabinet and on other pieces of furniture were rattling and I was certain that not only were they being broken, I thought the house was falling apart.

I looked out the big picture window and saw heavy CAT earth movers flattening everything around the house.  With absolutely no trouble, they were taking out houses as well as the forest.  In that strange way dreams have a way of doing, the window then became a television screen showing disturbing images from around the country.

In the dream, the shaking stopped and I opened the front door and was surprised that one of the huge CAT earth moving machines was so close, I could reach my hand out and touch the side of it.

I shut the door and felt as if God was telling me to look around the room.  Not only had no china or glass been broken, no pictures had even been shaken from the wall.  Everything was in the place that they should be.

Then He spoke to me in the dream in a voice that filled the room.  "The earthquake and shaking came through what you were watching when the window became a television screen, not the illusion of what was going on outside your window."

The Truth of what He was saying in that dream was immediate.  I had let the earth shattering fear enter my reality because I had been gazing through the computer screen or the television screen and not my actual picture window.  It was then that I woke up and I felt His peace and calm overflowing me in "real time".

He knows each of us far better than we know ourselves and He knows what to bring our way to fill us with peace.  Sometimes it is a Psalm, sometimes a story, at other times it is listening to a particular piece of music, or talking to a friend.  In this case, it was in the form of a dream.

Honestly, I hadn't realized just how much attention I was giving to various forms of media until the dream made it apparent.  I don't listen to the national news in the evening but I do catch tidbits here and there on Facebook and I listen to videos of various trusted Christians who share their opinions... usually in the form of very bad news.

I will still listen off and on to people I trust but no longer am I making a steady diet of the news and/or speculation about what the news means to us as Christians.  I need to remember that whatever happens in the future, it will be like what Mr. Ten Boom told his daughter... God will give us the ticket (grace) at the time we need it. I think that is what the old timers meant by... "Don't borrow trouble".

I also have to remember that "greater is He that is in me, than he that is in the world"!  The Bible tells us that satan goes around like a roaring lion, seeking whom he can destroy.  The real lion, the Lion of Judah, has control of my future and I need to always remember that.  We all do!

Image:  Canadian Mining & Energy