The dream connection

It happened again! During the days we worked on renovating the house, see earlier post, I chatted with one of the guys I've never met before. Not assuming he was a Christian I asked him a bit about how he viewed life. It turned out he didn't belong to any church, unusual in Paraguay, and didn't seem to want to. Fine with me, we were just talking. And then it came: he started to tell me about a dream he had a few weeks ago, which connected to another dream he's had three times in his life, the same one! And suddenly we were talking about fulfilling our life's destinies.

This is not the first time that the subject of dreams has been the bridge into talking about faith. In fact, I have come to believe that most people have one or more significant dream in their life that their looking for the answer to. And many people dream regularly dreams that they know are more than just the processing of their daily experiences. It's often enough to show yourself open to the dream world and interested in listening, the rest comes by itself.

Sadly this dimension of the Christian life seems to have been lost somewhere. That God speaks through dreams is obvious in the Bible, to all kinds of people. it has been and still is a vital part of the spiritual life of many believers and churches. But especially in the West, and the continents we have "blessed" with our theology the interest in dreams really have been lost. Usually you have several hindrances to go through:
- Pastors are sometimes afraid that people will put their experiences over the Word, and are therefore reluctant to speak about dreams.
- Many of them have bad experiences with dreams and misinterpretations. Most ministers have met what someone called "the flaky fringe", often immature people that use spirituality to avoid dealing with issues in their life.
- Most of us pastors doesn't have any training in how to deal with dreams. We simply don't know what to do with dreams.
- The people who DO teach on dreams often come from the "wrong" part of the church. They tend to be either charismatics or catholics/high church or Jungian psychologists. Or a mix of these.

For these and many other reasons we are not really equipped to deal with dreams, neither do we have routines in our churches for them. So we are quite deaf in this area. Which is sad, because it seems to me that God is using this way of speaking to people a lot these days.

Ironically, I personally hardly remember any of my dreams and usually don't listen to God in that way. Go figure.