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Exchanged Glory IV: A Time for Every Purpose
<page 67>For years I had felt like He had asked me to obey while He ignored my trauma. Now I could sense that He was holding me …tenderly talking to me about the issues that plagued me. I no longer just believed He loved me; now I felt like He did.
The prophecy I mentioned in the previous chapter greatly encouraged me, but when I returned home, the problems in my family remained. None of my attempts to fix the situation did much good, so I decided to focus on learning to hear God’s subjective voice. I hoped that He might show me something that would help.
I suspected He was speaking to me consistently in dreams. Whenever I woke up from sleeping, I would look inside my mind to see if I could remember what I had been dreaming. Then I would write what I found in a notebook (using a pen with a light on it). Later, I would spend time praying to see if God would give me interpretations.[42]
I learned partly through trial and error. If I thought a dream was warning me about some coming difficulty, I prayed and waited to see if the difficulty happened. In the beginning, frightening dreams about my family were the easiest to interpret. After a while, I became skillful with other types of dreams as well.
I also found a good deal of help by looking at dreams I had recorded more than five years earlier. As I compared them with what had happened in my life over the past five years, I realized they had symbolically foretold the stage in my life I described in Exchanged Glory III: Wise as Serpents.[43] I even found a few dreams from the mid-1990s that seemed to foretell the time of trouble my family was now experiencing. The parallels between the images in my dreams and my experiences helped me to gain skill with symbolism.
In the average week, I began to understand more of what God was telling me subjectively than I previously had in most years. I at last saw why I hadn’t been able to discern His messages when I was younger. I simply hadn’t had the wisdom to sort out His insights from all of the other traffic that made its way through my brain. With my emotions especially, I had been so confused that any attempt to discover what the Holy Spirit was saying tended to degenerate into demonic distractions.
<page 68>For example, the Holy Spirit might touch me with feelings of love for some person so I could pray for them, but another voice would add the thought that my prayers would be fairly quickly answered. When the answers didn’t show, I assumed I hadn’t heard from God at all. In reality the first message had been from the Lord, but a clever spirit had added a deception to it in order to convince me that I was out of touch with Him.
By 1998, the prattle of darkness no longer confused me as it once had. I had spent many years studying wisdom and theology and was no longer swayed by every impression that bounced around in my thoughts. I sometimes found myself saying, “I just handled in two seconds something that would have thrown me off track for months when I was younger.”
Also, the lessons I wrote about in Exchanged Glory III: Wise as Serpents had turned me into a quick learner. I was able to stay away from the three Wisdom Killers: loving simplicity, scoffing, and hating knowledge.[44] I used repetition, reflection, and practice to treasure what I was sensing.[45] The disciplines of Proverbs allowed me to make fast progress with the subjective voice of God.
I wrote down an average of two or three dreams per night. After about two years, I found myself able to consistently interpret most of them. This had a huge psychological impact on me. God no longer seemed like a far-off King who had given me a book to read. Instead, He was talking to me daily about the issues of my life.
God always answers, one way or another, even when people don't recognize his presence. In a dream, for instance, a vision at night, when men and women are deep in sleep, fast asleep in their beds — God opens their ears and impresses them with warnings to turn them back from something bad they're planning, from some reckless choice, and keep them from an early grave, from the river of no return.
(Job 33:14-18, The Message)
God opened my ears and impressed me with warnings regularly. He turned me from many sins and reckless choices.
A number of my dreams were not complimentary. For example, sometimes I was in school but had no idea when or where my classes were (symbolic for being out of touch with the lessons God had for me), sometimes I was uncoordinated (symbolic for a lack of godly skill), and at others I was poorly dressed (symbolic for being unprepared). In one dream, school officials came to my house to see whether a brain injury was making it hard for me to learn about the sin and destruction around me (symbolic for the difficult time I was having dealing with people who rebelled against God).
I chose to see these images as humbling and humorous correction rather than harsh criticism, and they were balanced by other images that showed my growth. God was speaking to me about many parts of my life – and in a fun way.
I was in awe that He would be involved with me like this. My life began to remind me of a verse in Isaiah that I had longed to experience since I was young:
<page 69>The Master, GOD, has given me a well-taught tongue, so I know how to encourage tired people. He wakes me up in the morning, wakes me up, opens my ears to listen as one ready to take orders. The Master, GOD, opened my ears, and I didn't go back to sleep, didn't pull the covers back over my head.
(Isaiah 50:4-5, The Message)
God woke me on many mornings, and His voice transformed me. His insights were like medicine to my heart, and my emotions slowly came out of the cage into which I had chased them. My faith grew that Jesus could work with their disarray.
This Father who opened my ears to listen was able to deal with the real me, the sometimes-emotional basket case who I found so frightening. He was my Wonderful Counselor who knew my inner workings backwards and forwards. He explained a little more of them each day.
I was discovering another area of the glory of God that I had exchanged for a lie (Rom 1:22-24).[46] In this case, it hadn’t been a false image that kept me from the truth; it was my lack of maturity. I hadn’t been able to discern good and evil well enough to recognize the subjective voice of God.
But solid food belongs to those who are of full age, that is, those who by reason of use have their senses exercised to discern both good and evil.
I was now coming closer to full age. As a result, the King who was an active mover and shaker in the earth was moving and shaking in me – and this caused my heart to melt. My Father was taking me step by step through my inner pain into healing. For years I had felt like He had asked me to obey while He ignored my trauma. Now I could sense that He was holding me …tenderly talking to me about the issues that plagued me.
I no longer just believed He loved me; now I felt like He did.
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