Made Out in the Shades

Therefore, O King Agrippa, I was not disobedient to the heavenly vision — Acts 26:19

Visions are not as rare as many tend to think, but neither are they normally as dramatic and overwhelming as that which came upon Saul of Tarsus. I doubt that anyone is converted apart from a vision. We just don't call it that. We talk about a realization or a sudden understanding. It may not be, most likely it isn't, a direct vision of Christ. Instead we are stopped on our way by something we don't really understand. The light flooding into our eyes may not show us anything except our own blindness. The words we hear may give us only the next step rather than our ultimate destination.

Things that had been chafing us and challenging us at last confront us. We find ourselves pushed in a new direction. Remember that after his encounter with Jesus, Saul was blind for three days. Vision does not equal immediate clarity of purpose and direction. We are not necessarily like the Donald Pleasence character in "Hallelujah Trail" who, upon imbibing, would shout, "I see it now!"

Leading up to our house is a simple little drive made of limestone. We have a family or two of killdeer that live around our pond. They often come up and build their nest in the bare road. This involves creating a little hollow in the gravel where the eggs can rest. How they figure out the spots where the wheels or the mower will miss them is beyond my comprehension, but they do. They apparently depend upon the kindness of the stranger not to take them out with the trimmer. For weeks, I will see one of the adult birds doing the broken-wing draw play in front of my truck, tractor or bike. The little eggs are a silvery gray with black specks, and, unless one knows to look for them, they are hard to spot amid the grays and whites of three-quarter inch limestone chunks.

In a dream that I had a few days ago, I was walking on the driveway, and there, in the middle as usual, were two plover eggs. They looked a little odd, though, too small and too flat, too two-dimensional. I looked around and saw, off in the grass, two more eggs, larger and more natural in appearance. Knowing that I would run the mower over them, I decided to pick them up and replace them in the nest from which they must have been removed. Oddly, with the two speckled plover eggs, I saw another egg colored like a robin's, solid pale blue but much too large. When I stooped to pick up the eggs, I saw that the blue egg was really (or had turned into) a slightly flattened, roughly egg-shaped piece of soap — a half of one split at the long axis and set on that flat edge. That wasn't too surprising since we sometimes hang bar soap on the trees to freak out the deer. I looked down again and saw a lens from a pair of sunglasses lying on the road. I picked it up and held it in front of me.

If you have ever been out in the deep dark, like a remote woods on a moonless night, with only a lantern or flashlight, you have a good idea of how the mind works. Your mind is the dark forest. Consciousness is where the lantern spills its illumination. Dreams are a flash of lightning over the woods or a break in the clouds that allows the reflected light of the moon to bathe the world for a moment. Dreams are, by necessity, personal. My pastor used to say that we always have the interpretation with a dream or vision — Old Testament exceptions of Pharaoh and Nebuchadnezzar notwithstanding.

Truth is fragile and must be maintained whole to bring forth life.

Truth must be sought out and protected.

If we are truly looking for truth, we will know it when we see it.

If we find truth off the beaten path, we should ask ourselves if our direction needs to change.

Handling truth requires cleansing. We must be obedient to it rather than using it for our own ends. Our motives must be at least 99 and 44/100ths percent pure.

It is always wise to remind ourselves that we often see only a dim reflection of reality — "in a glass darkly".

Illusions of the Grave Cave

The twelve gates are twelve pearls; each individual gate was made of a single pearl. The broad street of the city was pure gold, like transparent glass. – Revelation 21:21

Abraham lived in tents because he was looking for a city with foundations, whose architect and builder is God (Hebrews 11:9-10). When Moses was told to build the Tabernacle, he was instructed to make the Holy of Holies a perfect cube of ten cubits, about fifteen feet high, wide and deep – to house the Ark of the Covenant on which God’s Presence dwelt. The City of God as described in Revelation is a cube as well, though a massive one – fifteen hundred miles across and high. The Lord seems to be telling us that His city, the kingdom, or heaven is very much a Most Holy Sanctuary wherein His Presence truly dwells. The size of the city hints at the grandeur and majesty of God. All the gold and the pearl gates and the twelve foundations of glorious stones are elements reflected in the types Moses created for the Tabernacle and the priestly attire of Aaron.

Consider for a moment that good, old-fashioned and endangered incandescent light bulb. In its small, humble way, it is a little like the sun, for it burns, giving off light and some heat. Still, if I were to say to someone who is unfamiliar with light bulbs that they are like the sun, when that person saw a bulb for himself, he might be justifiably disappointed. On the other hand, suppose somewhere a person lived who was familiar with the various kinds of artificial light sources but had never seen the sun, the moon, or the stars. Perhaps he is a cave-dweller living an exclusively subterranean existence. If we met this denizen of the caverns and began to tell him of the great light that illuminates the world, we might compare it to one of his little light. We might tell him to imagine a huge floodlight set high above his head. We might be poetic, eloquent and inspired in our description, yet when he saw the sun with his own blinking, shuttered, aching eyes, he would be stunned by the reality. No description could prepare him for the brilliance of the light or the burning heat of a deep summer day.

“Our God is a consuming fire” – You may have looked into the heart of a live volcano, but it will seem a tea candle compared to the fire of God. “Jesus is the light of the world” – We will know that metaphor for the pitiful thing it is when we face Him and, like John the Revelator, fall helpless at His feet unable to bear the brightness of His visage. We will know gold, pearls, and diamonds for the weak comparisons they are when we see the living Sanctuary in all its glory.

Even when we are blessed with glimpses through the fog, when we see a flash of glory in a dream or a vision, when our eyes are opened and we see “the chariots and horsemen of God” or “His train filling the temple”, it is hard to hang on to it. Others will tell us we have an overactive imagination. They will say we are extrapolating from the ‘real’ – the cave-dweller might say the same thing about our ‘sun’, if he never ventured to ascend. Someone will tell us that we just believe in such things because we want them to be so. In a way, that, at least, is true – except these are not self-indulgent, self-glorifying daydreams. If we think of self at all in the face of that glory it is to recognize our unworthiness and be humbled. Again, as my friend Eddie said, God will not allow us to think better of Him than He can be to us. He will not show us visions of stars when all He has to give us are 40-watt bulbs. If my dreams exceed the limitations of the world, then it is the world that needs to be cracked open.

Ice Box Visions

Sometimes things come to me in the shower. This time it came to me at the refrigerator. I am no prophet, but then what I’m seeing it nothing new if you’ve read history or Orwell.

First, we are going to enter a period of high, perhaps hyper, inflation. There is almost no question of this. It is unimaginable that we will not. Only if there is some miraculous quantum leap in technology and, subsequently, productivity, can this be avoided.

Second, we import much of what we see on store shelves. We are dependent on the industrial capacity of countries like China and South Korea for our standard of living.

I see the draft being reinstated, perhaps as a Universal Military Service with a civil service component. We are going to need a very large army. At some point, all the dire predictions of U.S. imperialism by the left are going to come true. The irony will be that imperialism will be all but institutionalized under a leftist administration and Congress.

Keynesian economic policies have been tried and failed repeatedly. The only benefit to Keynesian theory is that is serves to enhance the power of a central government. That is the only reason it continues to be lauded, and it proponents given Nobel prizes. When it has failed in the past, there have been free-market, capitalist economies around to bail the failures out and prop up global finances. That will not be the case for America this time. No one is going to bail us out or be able to bail us out.

Except at the point of a gun.

We will indeed become the world’s police department – or perhaps the world’s IRS agents.

All the talk about principles and freedom and dialog will go out the West Wing window when the American sheeple begin to bleat and rumble for their Doritos and Idols. The leftist politicians will do whatever they have to do to retain power. They will never again willingly give up the advantage they have in this country. Demographics are – for the moment – on their side. If placating the majority means something like turning South Korea into a colony (to save them from North Korea, again, of course), they will do it a heartbeat.

When you create your constituency by pandering to the lowest forms of self-serving greed, you essentially have no choice but to continue. If you can’t get any more money from your own citizens to mollify the masses, then you get it from some other country. We are already trying to economically strong-arm the Chinese into buying what will soon be worthless paper to fund our debt. Will Reid, Pelosi, Clinton, and Obama use the threat of actual force to continue supporting their power trip?

I hope I am completely wrong – and that would be consistent with my usual predictive ability.

Yet I am troubled by the nature of the “entitlement” mentality that dominates those who support the left. “Community organizing”, for example, amounts to a method of funneling government money into specific neighborhoods. It is the antithesis of productive self-reliant wealth creation. It is parasitic. It is redistribution of wealth. “Government money” means that it came out of someone else’s pocket. But what happens when currency has become so devalued by inflation that no one’s pocket is worth picking in this country? The entitlement/community organizer mindset says, Get it from somewhere else. It they won’t give it up willingly, we’ll just have to take it from them. We move from the Weimar Republic to the Reich in one swoop.

Let’s pray I just got hold of a bad hot dog.

A Garment of Light Woven in Darkness

He had sent a man ahead of them -- Joseph, who was sold as a slave. They hurt his feet with shackles; his neck was put in an iron collar. Until the time his prediction came true, the word of the Lord tested him. -- Psalm 105:17-19

Joseph was the favorite son of Jacob. He was also the chosen of God -- in many ways a type of Christ -- who was to provide the means for establishing Israel as a nation under the protection of the world power, Egypt. Joseph was his father's favorite by birth -- the eldest son of his beloved wife Rachel. Beyond that, Joseph was gifted with prophetic understanding and wisdom, a genius of sorts. Having to deal with him as the father's favored would have been bad enough for his brothers, but his gifts made him even more insufferable. The air of confidence, the sense of knowing, it would have come across as arrogance even if it wasn't -- and Joseph was only human. After all Joseph had a vision of God's plan: his brothers would bow down to him. He would rule over them.

Then the word of the Lord began to test him. Joseph had to learn that the ways of God sometimes pass through darkness and through pathways hidden to the sight of man.

Abused by his brothers, sold into slavery in Egypt, Joseph did not lose faith. He made the best of it and did well. But the path led further down, as he was falsely accused and wrongly imprisoned. The word still tested him. What was in him? Even in the dungeons, his wisdom and integrity puts him in a place of trust and leadership. It doesn't seem like exactly what he had in mind, to be number one -- at the prison. Yet Joseph still shows no sign of bitterness, resentment, or any lack of forgiveness. He clings to God as that exalted vision tries him to the utmost.

When, at last, his gifts seem to give him an opportunity for a glimmer of hope, nothing comes of it. He continues to languish for two full years.

Then "the time" came. His prediction came true. God lifts Joseph. The path emerges into bright light and full view. Joseph is "suddenly" prime minister of the richest, most powerful nation on earth. His wisdom delivers not only the Egyptians, but his own family. Through Joseph, Israel and his descendents find favor in the court of Pharaoh. To his fearful brothers Joseph says, "You meant it for evil, but God meant it for good."

I see that I do not measure up to this attitude. Too often I hold onto things that should be released. I doubt God in the midst of trials and become depressed and hopeless, yes, even bitter. A brief trial is one thing, but something that drags on and on for years, how can that be God?

I need to remember that darkness is the time of rest. Rather than fretting and worrying in a trial, that is the time to take it as it comes and trust in God. If the path leads down – well, going downhill has advantages. As Jake Hess used to say, “Things will get better, get worse, or stay about the same.” When the night comes and no man can work, I will rest in the Lord. God means it for good.

Suffering, loss, and pain are not good things. Betrayal is not a good thing, yet the betrayal of a Judas brings salvation. God means it for good.

The shadowed path down, the road of testing and trial leads to the light. The word of the Lord will try me as He weaves my way in the dark, as He leads me to the light. God means it for good.