| << | Contents | >> |
Spirit-Led Identity Change
In 2019, I began writing the book A Dream Interpretation Journey. Two chapters of that book focused on the fourth dream I wrote down when I began recording my dreams in 1991.[30] While looking at this dream, I thought to myself, “I wonder what the first dream was that I wrote down? Since dream interpretation became such a big part of my life, maybe that first dream was something special as a sign of what was to come.”
I looked at the first dream, and it was indeed something special. In fact, it seemed to have prophetically laid out the story of my identity issues covering the next thirty years of my life. I am not sure I have seen another dream like it. I can’t prove that this is what the dream was about – it could just be a coincidence that its images match what happened – but I find it amazing that they fit so well.
I will use the dream to summarize what I have written about identity change. (Please don’t think that I am treating the dream as authoritative. My faith doesn’t rest in dreams; it rests in the truths spelled out in the Bible. I share the dream like I would an analogy. It is a group of pictures that help me summarize what I have written in this book.)
Here is the entire dream, pretty much as I recorded it (with a little editing for clarity and style):
I was with some people outside a circular area with a low fence around it. The fence was about waist high. There was a horse-sized larva-like creature in the area on a machine that was attached to the center of the area and reached out to the edge. I believe the machine could spin around so the larva could be at the edge of any part of the area.
While we were standing looking, the larva reached out over the fence with its head, grabbed someone with its mouth, and ate the person.
The next thing I remember, I was running from the larva and was scared. I climbed onto the roof of a house. It was basically my mother’s house (where I grew up), but it had a different roof.
The larva was now a big lizard, similar to a small tyrannosaurus rex or a raptor (a name I didn’t know when I dreamed the dream but learned while watching the movie Jurassic Park in 1993; for ease of reading, I will refer to the lizard as a raptor from now on). The raptor was jumping from the ground up towards me, trying to grab me and pull me down.
I was slapping it down with a paperback book. I think the book was the popular psychology book “I’m OK, Your OK”,[31] but I also think it wasn’t. As I was slapping the raptor down, it was biting the book and tearing it. I realized that in time, the book might be torn up, and I wouldn’t be able to slap with it anymore.
The raptor started to get a foothold on the roof, so that in order to get it off, I had to hit it harder and I think kick it too. I knocked the raptor to the driveway, which had a farther drop from the roof, hoping it would get hurt worse from the larger drop.
Then, when it came up the next time, I jumped off the roof and grabbed it. I held it under me while I landed on it with my knees. In other words, I grabbed it in mid-air and maneuvered it under me so that my full weight would be on top of it when we landed. We landed in the driveway.
The next thing I remember, I was in my mother’s garage, holding the raptor by its tail, swinging it around and around and hitting it on supports in the garage. When I finally stopped, the raptor was unconscious. I was relieved to see this, since I didn’t know if it was possible to knock it unconscious.
I took a hack saw and tried to cut its head off. I didn’t know if it would be possible to do this, but with a little work, I got the head off. I was still afraid it would come back to life.
Here is my interpretation (which I didn’t come up with until I revisited the dream in the past few years – almost thirty years after I dreamed it): The larva represents the approach to identity that is common in the world today. We think we are who we feel we are. When I was young, this approach had left me feeling compelled to explore a sexuality that was some distance from normal. My experience seemed to say that this was my only path to happiness.
The fenced in area represents the fact that I had some protection from this unhealthy approach in my early life. In both my heart and in the society around me, the “I am who I feel I am” philosophy of life had not yet become widely accepted. As the dream showed, it had not yet escaped from its boundaries, so it was somewhat manageable.
The larva looked kind of like a huge maggot, and it was an immature creature that would grow into something different (a raptor-like creature). This also was symbolic for the fact that when I was young, I and the culture around me had not yet fully worked out the approach to identity we see today. It existed in an immature form, but it had not yet grabbed control of the narrative of society. It was going to develop over the years until it reached its current state – something symbolized by a raptor.
Though the larva was contained, it still had an impressive power. This was symbolized by the machine which carried the larva around the fenced in area. There was something behind it that would eventually produce the identity politics and other movements we see today. It was going to reach beyond the boundaries that existed, and just as the larva consumed someone in the dream, people would be consumed by its message – all in the name of being true to themselves.
I didn’t interact with the larva in this first scene, but the rest of the dream makes it clear that it came after me. I had absorbed its worldview when I was young. It was only because Jesus saved me that I was able to escape.
The second scene in the dream, where I reached the rooftop, was symbolic for where my life currently was at the time I dreamed the dream. I believe my childhood house was symbolic for the fact that I was dealing with issues that had come out of my childhood. My past had shaped me, and I needed to face up to that past in order to find answers.
The real-life house is in Woodstock, NY, the town I grew up in during the 1960s. Those familiar with Woodstock in the 1960s know that it was a center of the cultural revolution of that time. Sayings like “be true to yourself” and “do your own thing” expressed the spirit of the age in Woodstock – a spirit that evolved into much of America’s worldview today.
My emotional life had formed in that environment. I had internalized its messages and based my future on them. Because of this, I felt dishonest when I didn’t live out of my inner feelings. With my sexuality especially, my feelings seemed to define who I was.
In the dream, the house I grew up in had a different roof, and this became a place of safety from which I could slap down the raptor. I believe this symbolized the change I described in chapter 4. This was the time when my sexual problems reached their worst, but it led to an understanding of the gospel that combined a revelation of 1) my sinfulness, 2) the judgment I deserved for that sinfulness, and 3) the love of God that saved me through Christ’s sacrifice on the cross.
This revelation opened my eyes to see some of the misconceptions that had led me astray, and I at last was struck in my emotions by the fact that I had been blind to the true nature of my situation. I realized that my sexual brokenness wasn’t just a little problem I could shake off. It existed because I was evil at the core of my being, and by expressing that evil I was causing damage in the earth. If strict justice were practiced, hell was what I deserved.
Yet Jesus had saved me. As I worked through the details of these worldview-rearranging insights, they removed the previous emotional covering I had built during my “be true to yourself” childhood in Woodstock (symbolized by the fact that the original rooftop had been replaced). I saw that being true to myself was not the wonderful good I imagined it to be, because I was wicked in ways I had never before imagined!
For eight years I had tried to express my heart in some way that would transform my inner being to match what I read in the Bible. I had disciplined myself; I had let go and let God; I had let myself sin and waited for God to do the work – nothing had changed me, because sin had so warped my personality that any expression that felt like “me” was going to include the sins that seemed to be such a large part of me.
The Bible tells us that the gospel is the power of God for salvation to all those who believe (Romans 1:16-17), and it became that for me. Once I really understood both my wickedness and Christ’s sacrifice, this set the stage for my life to turn around. I was able to stand on a new approach to life (symbolized by a new rooftop), and my actions changed in the following months.
I was now in a place of safety from which I could honestly face the disaster in my soul. I was able to study what was happening in the light of God’s word. I didn’t have to hide from the bizarre threats within me, and after several months of facing them, they no longer seemed so unmanageable. I found myself able to give up my sinful sexual actions. I still had problems in my emotions, symbolized by the raptor jumping up at me, but I was able to keep them at a safe distance.
The symbol of the book in the dream is another picture of this change. It was the psychology book I’m OK, You’re OK, and yet it wasn’t that book. In short, it was symbolic for the gospel – because it was the gospel that made me OK (thus the symbol if it being the book) – yet it didn’t make me OK in the way the psychology book I’m OK, You’re OK spelled out (so it wasn’t the book).
There is more to this symbol than that, however. I have summarized the practical insights that came out of the gospel in the first four steps I listed in chapter 4 of this book. 1) I knew I was loved and accepted by grace (i.e. I was OK), 2) I knew I needed to change, 3) I knew I was a new creation in Christ, and 4) I knew I had to develop a lifestyle in which I gradually learned to walk in the reality of who He had made me to be.
These four steps helped me to overcome what I call The OK Stronghold. It is a way of thinking that causes us to seek to feel OK about ourselves in unhealthy ways. We either fight to earn our “OKness” through good deeds, or we fall to seeking an easier feeling of “OKness” through sin.
At the time I dreamed this dream, I was about to give a teaching in church called “The Battle at the OK Stronghold.”[32] I had put the teaching together after reading I’m OK, You’re OK, and the teaching spelled out the gospel’s promise of finding our “OKness” through Jesus. Because of this teaching, the book was about the only symbol from the dream I understood back in 1991 when I dreamed it.
In the dream, I was able to slap down the raptor with this book, which was a picture of my life between 1980 and 2000. Because I knew that I was already OK through the blood of Jesus, I was able to discipline myself to learn everything I could about Him, His ways, and His world. If I hadn’t known I was already OK, all of my studying and imperfect attempts to live out what I was learning would have overwhelmed me. They would have created such a sense of “not OKness” that I would not have been able to handle my emotions. Knowing that I was already OK in Jesus, no matter how much sin and dysfunction was being exposed in my life, enabled me to embrace painful truth with a sense of God’s love and support. This allowed me to slowly work through the mess in my soul.
In spite of the life-saving effects of the gospel, the emotional problems that sprang from my misled upbringing continued to pull at my soul. Like the raptor in the dream, they rose within me again and again, trying to drag me back into sexual sin. This made me wonder whether I was a hopeless pervert whose useless attempts to be normal were going to eventually hurt everyone.
I hoped that this nagging possibility would fade into insignificance over time, but it became more persuasive through the years. Nothing seemed to free me from its growing false offer of fulfillment. It pressed me to return to being true to its presence.
I had seen many people over the years who had turned back, and I fought hard to not be one of them. Yet I seemed to be losing the fight. The lies continued to jump up from beneath and harass me like that raptor in the dream. Nevertheless, I slapped them down with the gospel.
In the process, I was learning how to hear the Holy Spirit in the dirt and grime of real life. I found out that Jesus was with me even if my experience wasn’t the pristine spiritual walk I hoped for. In the middle of imperfect obedience …while I dealt with doubt and accusation …while I still felt like a man fighting a raptor from a rooftop …while the message sustaining me was being attacked and torn like that book in the dream …while the world around me increasingly told me that sexual sins were inescapable – in that place, the Holy Spirit chose to teach me His ways.
I didn’t know I was dealing with a tendency toward a personality disorder that had morphed into sexual issues. All I knew was that the Bible told me that growing to know Jesus was the answer. So I slowly discerned His touch in my mind, will, and emotions. He helped me to map out the truth that exposed the misleading messages my emotions claimed were reality. He step by step led me forward through uncertainty while I learned to be a living sacrifice (Romans 12:1). I found answers to uncertainty as I proved and approved the good and acceptable will of God (Romans 12:2).
Nevertheless, I didn’t know what to do with my emotions. In the late 1990s I reached the point symbolized by the raptor gaining a foothold on the rooftop. Though I was learning to hear the Holy Spirit, I watched my emotions slowly lose their ability to tolerate the life I was choosing. Chapters 6 and 10 describe this time in my life. My emotions descended toward rage. It became more and more difficult to slap down the attacks (symbolized by the book being torn).
I found myself moving into the situation I described in Step 5 of chapter 4. Parts of my heart had locked into what God was doing, but others had become increasingly furious over “not being true to myself.” A growing internal divide was destabilizing me, and I needed to find some way to bring together the warring factions. So I decided to move into Step 6 – I let my conflicted emotions “fight it out,” trusting that Jesus would show me His way through the war.
The above section title, “Giving the Raptor a Death-Hug,” was chosen for a reason. Even though the next part of the dream showed me jumping off the roof, grabbing the raptor, and killing it, the real-life version of what happened felt far less violent. It achieved the same result – the death of my misled identity – but it did so through something that felt more like a hug than a death grip.
This doesn’t mean that I “hugged” the philosophies symbolized by the raptor. I continued to hold to the truth of the Bible – but I had been doing that for years, and it had led to my current emotional turmoil. I needed something different, something that would heal my inner being. So without letting go of truth and discipline, I turned and “hugged” my emotions. I stopped blaming them and started considering them to be important. I sought, through compassion, to extract them from the hold of my misled sense of identity.
I came up with the theory that their stubbornness was rooted in my refusal to treat them as valid parts of my heart. Because they tempted me toward sexual sin, they had been off limits for years. How could I let myself feel them while they caused sexualized images to flash before my mind!? What should I do when talking about my problems, even in vague terms, made other Christians uncomfortable?
Though I hadn’t wanted to suppress and disconnect from my emotions, they threatened everything I held dear, so I didn’t feel I had much choice but to turn against them. I decided to bury them until they “played nice” and acted more Christian – but they grew increasingly offended. So I became angry at them, stuffed them down, and tried all the more to make them go away – yet this only made them more rebellious.
I didn’t know that my mistreatment of my emotions was contributing to their downfall. I was giving the raptor it’s foothold. I had been able to slap down the worst effects of that for years, but now I could no longer avoid the message forcing itself on me. …Yet facing it was terrifying.
First, I was coming dangerously close to the exact line of logic that was turning the world against the word of God. That logic told me that attempts to give up an unusual sexual orientation would cause psychological damage, and the Bible’s teachings on sexuality were therefore harmful. It also said that by holding to the Bible’s standards, I was making myself an agent of harm to both myself and others. It didn’t matter if I had good intentions – I preached a message that caused damage.
My experience seemed to confirm that message. Here I was after almost thirty years of trying to follow Jesus, and I felt like I was on the edge of an emotional breakdown! I had denied my sexuality, and I was headed toward exactly the sort of consequences the world told me would result from that choice. Had I been wrong for all these years?
I didn’t want to consider that question. I believed in Jesus; I knew the objective evidence that He was who He said He was; I had also experienced the Holy Spirit as a living reality. I didn’t want to lose any of that, so I kept hoping the problem would go away without me facing this huge contradiction in my soul.
Sometimes we can’t escape a battle; we must fight it and either win or lose. So I reluctantly accepted the difficult path the Holy Spirit appeared to be laying out before me. He seemed to be showing me that the way through the darkness was to test the theory that rather than my problems being caused by choice to walk in purity, they were caused by my inability to make sense of the many emotions that had become a part of my misled sexuality. I needed to stop avoiding them and wisely embrace them.
I am forever grateful that I had gained the ability to stop my sinful actions many years earlier, but I had done so with limited skill. I had set straight paths for my feet (Hebrews 12:13), but I needed to also honestly deal with the valid parts of my heart that were still influenced by sexual sin. They needed to be transformed, not suppressed.
So I experimented to see if they were rebelling because of the way I treated them. Starting in the year 2000, I gave them a “death-hug” – treating them as valuable in spite of the temptations they brought. I sought to understand any valid needs they were calling for me to address. Maybe if I could listen to them without following them into sinful actions, I could learn what they were about. Perhaps if I could let myself mourn over their dysfunction, the Holy Spirit’s warmth, wisdom, and power – His comfort – would help to deprogram them from the harmful sexual indoctrination they had received in my youth.
Fortunately, I had learned to follow Jesus on the rooftop. I had already walked through many years of imperfect, threatening, messy situations, and I had discerned what the Holy Spirit was saying to me in the middle of them. Now I expanded that as I sought to add to my life a whole new level of imperfect situations that had previously been off limits. I looked for God to carefully lead me into what He had created my emotions to be.
I mentioned earlier that it was frightening to accept that my experience seemed to confirm the world’s message that it is dangerous to trust God to change a misled sexuality. I was now embracing the more frightening task of allowing that misled sexuality to tempt me. Sexualized images were part of the emotions I was now allowing myself to feel, and I knew what might happen if I fell to them. They could destroy my relationship with the Lord, my wife, and everything else.
I also knew of no Christian who had even attempted to treat any part of themselves related to sexual sin as something good. …Or to be more accurate, the ones I knew who had chosen to do so had walked out of the church and adopted lifestyles based around their sins. I had plenty of good reasons to stay with the silent consensus that I should avoid what was happening inside of me.
Nevertheless, I had tried fleeing for decades, and doing so had failed me. This was because the temptations weren’t situations that existed outside of me – they were my emotions. Wherever I fled, they came with me. I couldn’t flee from myself.
So I sought to reclaim them. I didn’t let them lead me into sinful actions or unscriptural conclusions about life, but I did pay attention to them. I withheld harsh judgment and looked at them through the eyes of love and faith. Perhaps if I could care for them without following them in wrong directions, God would change them enough that they could become useful parts of my life.
As I did this, I wrote books about what I was learning (The Exchanged Glory Series), and though I knew the books might destroy my reputation, I didn’t really care. I had lived with a wound buried in my soul for so long, and now I sensed it being healed. The Holy Spirit seemed to be leading me into the truth that was setting me free, and I wanted to spell it out and share it, even if doing so cost me my reputation.
I believe the symbol from the dream of me jumping from the roof, grabbing the raptor, and maneuvering it under me is a picture of all of this. I was embracing the raptor, considering its best arguments, being honest about how much it still felt like a part of me, and learning to see it as just one piece of a life that had already been largely transformed by Jesus.
I looked for the Holy Spirit to realign these wayward parts of my heart as He had done with many others. I knew I was doing something dangerous, symbolized by falling from the rooftop while grappling with a raptor, but I did what I could to make sure that when I hit the ground the raptor would be under me rather than me under it.
My twenty years on the rooftop had given me abilities I could only have dreamed of when I started. I watched in amazement as God gave me answers through the words of the Bible, through people, through circumstances, through obviously prophetic experiences, and in other ways. I was sensing the Holy Spirit’s leading in an amazing way. To my great relief, a seemingly impossible path to healing not only appeared before me, but it came with a grace and power I had dreamed of since I had been a young Christian.
It was at this time that I stopped looking for another “me” I could put on; I at last embraced the idea that “me” was a complicated set of thoughts, drives, and emotions that I needed to learn how to care for. I mourned the difficulty of doing this, and I let the Holy Spirit comfort and help me. I learned to love my emotions as I would children. I accepted them in their current immaturity, but I didn’t let them lead me into sinful actions. I challenged them to grow in the grace and truth of God.
This was how I at last came to grips with the raptor. I had already turned from its actions and intellectual deceptions; now I accepted the nature of the battle required to remove its hold on my emotions. I mourned my inner state by honestly expressing it before God; I experienced my longing; I admitted my anger; I humbled myself; I learned about my weaknesses; I waited for God to show up in whatever way He chose to. He graciously protected me while He nurtured and encouraged me to discover what He had created my inner life to be.
The final scene showed me killing the raptor in the garage. In my dreams, garages seem to be symbolic for relationships.[33] They are a place where my life (symbolized by my childhood house) meets the world around me. My final victory has come as I have discovered how to live out God’s answers with the people around me.
The dream ended with me cutting off the raptor’s head with a hack saw. I believe the hack saw is symbolic for a messy solution that feels “hacked together” (I am a computer programmer – a hack in computer programming is a messy solution).
The answers I found were not what I expected. They required me to embrace a broken inner life – one that might always be especially difficult because of a tendency toward a personality disorder. I had to find the wisdom and power of the Holy Spirit to step by step rise above my dysfunctions so I could serve others.
With this wisdom and power, however, came significant emotional changes. The battle today is a long way from what it was when I was young. Jesus has been helping me to live out the new identity He has given me.
It has been a long and difficult journey from my roots in Woodstock, NY to where I am today, but I have seen the glory of God through my relationship with Jesus, and it has transformed me (2 Corinthians 3:17-18). He helps me to find joy on the journey. Everything this world has to offer really is rubbish when compared to the reality of knowing Him (Philippians 3:7-8).
Search Comments
This page has been visited 0003 times.
| << | Contents | >> |
10 per page