Painful Dreams

Nightmares.

It’s very rare that this happens, but I think I actually woke my self up today from the pain that I was having in my dream. In my dream, I was crying so hard, gnashing my teeth so hard that it hurt. I almost hurt as much as it did after I got my surgery. When I woke up I wasn’t crying, and my jaw didn’t really hurt… but I could still feel the imaginary physical pain lingering from my dream and the emotional pain weighing on my heart.

It’s strange… for someone who is so bad at evangelism, God has given me such a big heart for the lost…

If I think back to all my nightmares… the only ones I really remember are the ones that were re-occurring and the ones about sharing the Gospel.

In one of those, some really good non-Christian friends of mine died without ever knowing my great God and Savior Jesus Christ. I saw their soul fall into dispair. (The sad part about this one… is it could be very true… in fact it happens everyday… not my direct friends, but someone’s friends…perhaps my indirect friends…)

Today’s dream started off extremely joyous. We were in another country… I don’t know why. Everyone that was with me was a Christian. But while we were there I met a man… and for some reason I couldn’t remember his name the entire dream… but I kept thinking his name was Raul because he looked a lot like Pastor Raul from Guadalajara. Anyway, in our travels… he was with us for some reason even though we had randomly met him at a hotel. He was a native there. At one of the stops we were making, he was having dinner with us, and suddenly I realized… I need to share the Gospel with him! (Though I didn’t ask if he was a Christian or not… I guess I just assumed he wasn’t) So I started… I said, can I tell you a story? And he said sure 🙂 So for a long part of the dream, I was telling him the story of our great God who created the heavens and the earth. For some reason during the dream I kept on digressing from the actual story and getting frustrated with my self (like… why did I mention that? What does that have to do with anything…?). The others we were traveling with were being distracting or making comments that didn’t really make sense and detracted from the Gospel. For some reason the story was taking a long time .I continued to talk even as we left the restaurant and got into the car… It felt like it was a 3 day story of me saying absolutely nothing except how God created the earth and how that was pretty amazing. Finally, I was kind of fed up and I pulled him to the side and emphatically told him I needed to finish the story because we were leaving the country soon and this was the most important story he’d ever hear. So I told him. I told him that we were sinful and in need of grace, I told him that God had sent His only son to die on the cross for our sins. He didn’t look phased. I tentatively asked him if he would like to pray and ask Jesus into his heart and accept him as his Lord and Savior. To my surprise, he turned towards me and said “I’d like that”. And so I prayed with him. I prayed that God would be working in him. I prayed many many things. During the prayer, I could see him genuinly breaking, repenting of sins, and allowing God to come in and fix everything about him. Afterwards, I was extremely excited! We had to tell everyone the good news! We’ll have a party for sure! This is your new birthday! We ran to share with everyone 🙂

(then you know how in dreams, people change for some reason… well for some reason, I realized that the person I took with me was a girl… but I had the impression they were the same person so… ya… dreams)

And this is where it turned sour…

We ran to the kitchen where … well let’s not name names… but some adults I really look up to, people I know are passionate about missions… I was so excited and bursting as I told them! But instead of getting joyous reactions like I thought they would… they suddenly became very solemn and continued cooking without looking at us. A couple of them at least acknowledged it and said “oh that’s good to hear”, “oh that’s nice”… but that was it…

We ran to another room and got the same reaction. I asked them, why couldn’t they be excited with me? Excited with her? Excited that someone had come to Christ, the greatest gift of all had been shared!! A life has been saved!

They replied something along the lines of… ya, this happens all the time, they say yes, but what does that really mean… and something along the lines of… accepting Christ will just make things worse. I had several flashes in my mind about stories of how prostitutes who want to accept Christ turn away because they can’t give up their profession… or if they do… they’re at a loss of what to do… they run out of money and turn to poverty… and then about people who become persecuted in their countries because of Christ. And all those other stories of hardship.

I was so heart broken I ran out of the room frustrated and confused. As I fled, I clenched my jaw super tight (this is where the physical pain started), trying to hold back tears… I ran down the stairs and ran into a person I didn’t expect would be the person I would run to in a dream for consolation. But this person seemed to be the only one who cared to listen… (maybe also because I ran into them bawling). Through the pain and gnashing of my teeth and the uncontrollable tears I just vented all my frustration…

No one wanted to help me share the Gospel… infact, during that time it was almost like they were trying to stop me, they kept getting in my way.
When it finally happened, it finally happened… no there was no one to share the joy.
My heart hurt so much for her, I could see her face… looking so dejected. I had took her, hoping to bring her into a family that would accept her with open arms… but it was like everyone was rejecting her. What have I done?
Why didn’t anyone care about bringing people to Christ?
How could they think this could ever be a bad thing?
How could they be so pessimistic about someone’s salvation? Is it even possible to be pessimistic when someone’s been saved?

How am I supposed to help her and disciple her and teach her about the faith by myself?
What am I supposed to do?
Why am I so alone?

There was no resolution. The pain in my jaw became too intense to bear. I was trying to talk while holding back tears even though I was crying the hardest I’ve cried since Jan 6, 2007. That puts a lot of stress on the jaw… I felt like my bones were going to break.

And so I woke up sad.

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