I have always given great credence
to the meanings of dreams and signs.
Ever since I was young, some of my dreams have seemingly been glimpses
of insight into past and present situations, or “sneak-peeks” into what the
future might hold. I am NOT saying that
I can predict the future. I cannot. It feels more like a deeply ingrained
intuition or a God-given discernment.
Whatever you would like to call it, it mainly helps me to make sense of
my life and what goes on in my sphere of existence.
As far back as I can remember, I
would have dreams about different people and within days, I would see/hear from
them or would hear that something major was going on in their lives. Some dreams were simply how my mind tried to
make sense out of craziness going on around me.
For example, right after Ken was diagnosed with cancer, I started having
a lot of “out-of-control” dreams. I
dreamed we were in a car with no brakes.
Then I dreamed we were in a helicopter being piloted by a family member
whose driving in a car scares me senseless. Those dreams could be completely attributed to
the frightening situation of Ken’s terminal illness and how helpless and out of
control I felt at the time.
Other dreams, however, seemed to
be more prophetic in nature. When I was
in college, I always knew if my little brother was sick or hurt, because I
would dream about him and wake with a feeling of great concern. Upon calling home to check, he would be
running a fever, or have some sort of kid injury. I can’t explain how I knew… I just felt
it. Once, I dreamed about my college “Big
Sis”, whom I hadn’t seen in years. In
the dream, she showed me a sweet baby boy in a stroller and said, “Melinda, I
would like to introduce you to my son.”
Less than two weeks later, she called me out of the blue and told me
that she had had a baby… a BOY! Two or
three weeks before my niece announced that she was expecting her first child, I
dreamed that I saw her pregnant. Another
time I had a crazy dream about a dear childhood friend. When I called to check on her, she revealed
that she was having some serious health problems.
Some of my dreams though, like
the one the other night in which I acquired a new house pet… an OSTRICH named
Gertrude, are just plain crazy and clearly not prophetic (at least I hope
not!). I think those are purely for our
entertainment and to make us laugh. God
does have an awesome sense of humor.
As far as signs go, I believe
that God gives us signs all the time. I
laughingly say that having an iron shoot sparks and blow up in my hand was a sign
from God that I was not supposed to iron, ever again. I don’t, by the way. J I
firmly believe that God gives us signs through nature, through the people we
have contact with, through our seeking His face through the Bible and
prayer. Most of the time, though, I
think we are too busy to notice, let alone take heed, of the signs He gives us
to direct us during our lives.
Ken and I had discussed at great
length what I should do if he didn’t survive his cancer. We both agreed that if he died, I should take
the boys and move to Alabama to be closer to my family. There was no great sign that brought us to
that conclusion. Just a heart-felt
consensus that it would be the best thing for us to do. After moving down here, though, I was faced
with disposing of his properties in GA.
When I sold his largest property, I wrestled with whether or not I
should pay off our house, or invest the money or put it into savings. Had been trying to decide for about a month,
when my daily Bible reading just happened to be 2 Kings 4:1-7 where a widow
with 2 sons (sound familiar?) came to Elisha and said that her sons were going
to be taken as slaves to pay her husband’s debt. She needed help to protect her sons. Elisha asked her what she had. The widow replied “All I have left is a jar
of oil”. He told her to go and borrow
all the bottles and jugs she could find.
I am sure that the widow had no idea how collecting bottles and jugs
would help her protect her sons. She
probably questioned Elisha’s sanity. But
she knew that Elisha was a man of God, so she did what he said. Then Elisha told her to pour her oil (the
only thing she had left, remember?) into one of the bottles. She started pouring and kept on pouring until
every single bottle and jug was full to the brim. Elisha said to the widow, “Sell the oil and
pay your husband’s debt. You and your
sons can live on what is left.” THAT
DAY, I made arrangements to pay off our house.
To the depths of my soul, I knew this Scripture passage, at this time in
my life, was God’s sign telling me to protect my sons by making sure we had a
home to live in. Months later, when the
housing market bottomed out and people everywhere were going “upside-down” in
their mortgages, my sign was confirmed.
I praise God every day that we don’t have to worry about mortgage
payments.
This all brings me to another
sign… one I think I missed, until the Lord revealed it to me last week. I’m still processing it, and it may be hard
to get down into words, so bear with me.
From very early on in our relationship, Ken called me his “angel”. I had never considered myself particularly
angelic before we met, and I certainly don’t always act that way, but the love
in his eyes whenever he said it made me believe it could be true. When we were planning our wedding, I found
the cutest set of kissing angels. I
thought they would be perfect on our wedding cake. We already had a cake topper, so I decided
they would look precious between the top two tiers, so I told our caterer that’s
what I wanted. As I was getting dressed
the day of the wedding, someone came and handed me the box that held my kissing
angels. The caterer had sent them up
with the message that one of the angels was broken, so we would just leave them
off the cake. In a panic, I opened the
box and to my dismay, found that the wings of the boy angel, the one that
represented Ken, were broken. The
feeling of dread I had as I held those tiny broken wings in my hand that day is
difficult to explain. Despair washed
over me, but I knew that those angels HAD to be on our cake. Folks probably thought I was having an attack
of pre-wedding crazies, but Mama told Daddy to go and buy some Crazy Glue and
fix that angel. I think Daddy was
probably already dressed in his tuxedo, but he took off in search of glue. By the time of our reception, the boy angel
was repaired and the set was perched on our cake, just as I had wanted them to
be. Mama and Daddy to the rescue, as
usual.
Now… last week, out of the blue
clear sky, a thought quietly came to me.
Were the broken angel wings a sign that I had been too busy to
notice? Had Ken’s broken angel been a
sign that he would have to leave us too soon?
And if it was a sign, why did God wait until now, almost ten years after
Ken died, to reveal it to me? As I
pondered, a line of the song I had played at Ken’s funeral started twirling
around in my head… “but his body grew weary, for his wings were broken”. A day or so after that, a FB friend posted a
quote from Ernest Hemingway that said, “The world breaks everyone and afterward
many are strong in the broken places”. I
am not completely sure what all the references to brokenness mean, but oddly,
they have been a comfort to me. Maybe it
is God’s way of reminding me that He has always known every second of my life
and that He will take whatever is broken and make it strong again. I’m still waiting and listening for whatever
else He wants to reveal about it. In the
meantime…
Pay attention to
signs from above, and SWEET DREAMS!!
