All These Things Together

All These Things Together

Written by Dan McDonald

 

            I am modern enough to believe that God doesn’t usually speak in our dreams. But sometimes I wake up from a dream asking “what does this mean?” This week in the middle of the Lenten season, near the end of winter, and with gloomy news on my Facebook and Twitter feeds I had a dream. I could not but wake up wondering what the dream meant.

            Early in the week I followed the news of Israel’s election. I am not Israeli but the election drew my attention. I read articles in Israeli newspapers. In my Conservative Christian world, it was all so cut and dried – Netanyahu is an Evangelical hero. The Prime Minister is seen as standing for everything that is good and true. But among Israelis there are questions and concerns of what is happening to their dream of their nation Israel. There is a sense that their great military triumph in 1967 has saddled them with a situation from which they do not know how to extricate themselves. Their democracy is freedom for Israelis and occupation for the Palestinians. There is a sense of a stained conscience that descendants of a people surviving the holocaust are now occupiers of a foreign people. But they fear what will happen if Palestinians are given their freedom. Who can extricate Israel from the burden of its past victories and who can bring reconciliation if peace and freedom are extended to former and present enemies? The fear factor prevailed in Israel's election, but Netanyahu’s Israel can hardly be mistaken as a confident Israel. Perhaps this election had been destined to be one that expressed a sobering gloom for everyone but those that counted themselves the chosen few.

            The day after the Israeli election I received news that a friend of one of the first people I followed on Twitter had died from a long bout with cancer. The friend of my Twitter friend had battled for a long time with the cancer that brought her to the grave this week. I don’t always agree with my Twitter friend. But I read her blog because when we do agree she speaks to my soul as much as anyone whose words I read. When we don’t agree she speaks to my mind and makes me think as few people do. Their friendship had begun in their early teen years and matured through the times when each of them would marry and deepened as it moved to the one friend’s final breath.

            By that evening I received news that a man, my age, a cancer survivor with a wife and three children in their early adult years, was in the hospital. At first it seemed something fairly ordinary for someone who faced difficulties stemming from surgeries removing a colon and some other internal parts. We prayed but the news grew ominous. Sepsis had taken hold of his body. The word sepsis is unrecognizable to many, but for so many others it is understood for how it took someone they loved among the 250,000 Americans it kills each and every year. We prayed even as one posted that they hoped the daughter coming from California would make it in time to see her father. By Thursday morning our prayers were chiefly being expressed for the grieving friends and family members who had lost a dear husband, a wonderful father, a kind and compassionate friend. He had passed away early Thursday morning, near the darkest of the morning hours.

            There was lesser news. A disgruntled Canadian from one of the Atlantic Provinces was growing tired of winter. Her jokes described how she no longer feared that an intruder might break into her house through her windows, because he would tire of shoveling all the snow it would take to get down to her windows. March is the month when winter tries to hang on as spring slowly makes its way to northern lands.

            This is also the season of Lent, when we go out to the Wilderness and face demons and temptations in a season contemplating what we need to sacrifice if we are to walk in nearness to our God and with our Savior. But we do not go into the Wilderness so much to change our lives as we do to capture a glimpse of His life, in whom, we have found life. He came to face down the desires that were natural to him. He was hungry and faced down the temptation to satisfy it with bread alone. He was coming to establish God’s kingdom and he was offered a way to have it without suffering and death. He came to the Wilderness to face every temptation that could somehow deter him from his pathway of obedience that led to death on a cross. This is the season of Lent, the season in the Wilderness.

            With all these things upon my mind I had a dream. My parents passed away many years ago, in 1989. I was closer to my father. I have had a number of dreams of visiting him in the family home where I grew up since his passing, and often my mother is there also sort of in the background but a definite part of our moment together in a dream. But this time he was not a remembrance of his healthy years. My Dad appeared in a ravaged cancerous form, not like I remembered him in those last days, but as if he had become an abstract representation of death and gloom.

            Often when I have had dreams of my father after his passing I would wake up to reality and feel deeply depressed because the joy of seeing him was replaced with the awareness that this was after all just a dream.

            But this day I woke and thought it is winter and spring comes, there is gloom in the Wilderness, death abounding, but soon it will be Easter – and RESURRECTION!