A little weekend extra for the New Year.
For those who never remember your dreams, you probably do not get any extra sleep. I woke up early the other day and after I was fully awoken by the cat moaning, I got a little extra sleep. However, the extra sleep came with a dream that left me fully awake and angry.
Waking up angry from a dream does not seem overly positive and as I started to process my anger, I tried to figure out who had set the piece of my dream up to anger me. My first thought was that I was to blame as it was my dream. I get mad at myself for a whole lot of things that end up not as well as planned, but it seemed foolish to be mad at myself for dreaming a dream.
In the dream, I woke up from a nap at a table in a big business meeting. My friend at the table warned me that if I left the table, my stuff would be removed from the table and indeed someone had already started removing my stuff while I was sleeping. In anger, I shooed that person away and promptly left the table to engage with others at the meeting I wanted to talk to during what I perceived to be a break. When I returned to the table, all my stuff was gone. As I awoke angry, I realized that I had been told the rules, chose not to follow them, and the consequences had been enacted. My first reaction was to change the rules.
However, about the time my thoughts turned to blaming myself, I realized the dream was not the sole creation of my mind, but it was a message from God that I could not change the circumstances of the world He created and that no matter how I wanted to behave, He had set the consequences and I had to follow the rules or suffer.
It is not quite the same as being before a burning bush or seeing an angel, but I was convinced that God through the Holy Spirit in me had taken another opportunity to awaken me to how my behavior did not line up with what I know. Now I just have to continue to learn and grow in my relationship with Him and I can stop doing some of the things that do not quite line up with chasing after God’s own heart.