Hearing from God in a Dream

Thanks for your comments and stories on my recent blog about hearing from God. Here is one of my own encounters that occurred through a dream or, more accurately, through a nightmare.

In my dream, I was strapping a 4-year old Chinese girl into a car seat. Don’t ask me how I knew that she was 4 years old – that’s just the way dreams are.

At any rate, I knew also that this was not a car seat. It was actually an electric chair and I was strapping the little girl in because the authorities had ordered her execution. Like many of my dreams where I’m trying to accomplish some task, I could not quite get it done. I’d fasten one latch and discover that there were two more that needed my attention. I’d work on those only to find that another one had come undone. Then, I’d decide that I needed to take the whole seat out of the car and start over. This went on interminably.

But my state of mind in this dream was much more importantly than this Sisyphusian task I was trying to accomplish. The whole time that I was trying to get this girl strapped into the seat, I was massively conflicted and anxious. I kept telling myself that I had to stop this. I kept saying to myself, “This little girl could not possibly have done anything that makes her worthy of death. She does not deserve to die.” I kept repeating this over and over, “She does not deserve to die.”

After a long struggle, both physically to get my task done and emotionally to deal with the trauma of what was happening, I woke up. My heart was racing and I was sweating and I experienced that relief that it was only a dream. But as the relief of “it’s only a dream” started to calm me down, God said, “Mike, millions of people are dying around the world each year that don’t deserve to die.”

There are two important things to know about this. First, when I say that God spoke to me, I do not mean that I heard an audible voice. This was a thought in my mind but I somehow recognized it as having an origin outside of myself. I want to say that it was an “implanted” thought. It was disconnected with anything I was thinking. I was not thinking about the dream or analyzing it or asking myself what it was about.

The second thing about this statement is that it was said to me in a matter-of-fact way. It did not come with any sense of judgment or condemnation – it was not as if God was saying, “millions of innocents are dying and you don’t give a rat’s ass about it”. It wasn’t angry. It wasn’t even sad which seems very strange to me but I’m just trying to be accurate in my reporting. It was simply a statement about reality.

Perhaps because it did not come with any shame or guilt or anger, it did not throw up any barriers in me. So I said, “Lord, what do you want me to do?” God said, “Give $x per month to Opportunity International.

Opportunity International is an organization that I’ve known about for many years and a group Debi and I have supported in the past. They are involved in microfinance as a way to alleviate poverty and hunger and oppression in the developing world. I love their model because money they raised is used repeatedly – it is loaned and repaid and loaned again. I also love it because it is more of a “teach a person to fish instead of give a person a fish” approach.

The “x” dollars per month was not some massive, sacrificial amount. It did not require taking out a 2nd mortgage on the house or telling the kids that they needed to drop out of college. I probably spend more than “x” dollars each month on fast food.

I want you to know that I’m a lousy giver. I am so far from being any kind of role model in this area. If I was a presidential candidate and was asked about my greatest moral failure (as in the recent Rick Warren forum with McCain and Obama), money/financial/giving issues would have to be in my top ten list. But this particular giving has a whole different feel. I enjoy it as much as I do spending money on some consumer product.

And this incident has become more than just an encounter with God. It has become a paradigm for me of a relationship-based, experiential approach to knowing God instead of just a principles-based approach to faith. I learn from the Bible that giving is a good thing. There are many biblical principles related to giving. But no matter how many principles I learn, the Bible can never tell me what to give and where to give. After all, there is massive need. I regularly run into people who are raising money for good and noble causes. What do I do with all these requests? I’ve decided that all I can do is walk with the God in an intimate and personal and conversational relationship and get involved in those things that he calls me to.

If you’ve had these types of encounters with God, I’m interested in hearing about them. Share your stories with us.