This past Tuesday, my teammate, Emily, planned a “house of prayer” night for our team and the team with us. It was an awesome night, as it was based on the word of God (John 15, in specific) and highly conducive to the ushering in of the spirit of God. We started by reading quietly the words of Jesus from John 15:1-17—“I am the true vine…remain in me, and I in you…”, and continued into prayer and intercession throughout the night.
What was most significant about this night for me, however, were two specific visions that God gave me. Let me make this clear: I am not a man who receives supernatural visions often—almost never, actually. I think it’s likely a combination of both the simple fact that God anoints everyone differently (Ephesians 4:11-12), and I see my anointing as a pastoral and teaching anointing, rather than a strong prophetic anointing, and the fact that the doubt I fight with in my “show me the proof” type of faith doesn’t always lend well to wholly supernatural visions. Though I am certainly striving for a more child-like, “blessed are those who believe without seeing” (John 20:29) type of faith and am also growing in the comfort that comes from knowing that there truly are “many gifts, but one Lord” (1 Corinthians 12), Tuesday night was, by all means, a welcomed occurrence.
This blog is a bit different in that I normally do not post blogs unless I can wrap them up in neat bows, complete with an overarching spiritual point. Even when I admit that I am in the middle of a certain journey, I am still typically able to sum it up neatly by simply declaring something to be true of the journey itself—that it was worth beginning or will be worth completing. The visions of this blog, however, make absolutely no sense outside of the context of future events yet to be fulfilled. I often joked with my old teammate, Hannah, about the length of my blogs, saying, “may God punish me and do so severely if I ever write a part two.” This blog, however, requires a part two—describing events, or even a lifestyle—that have yet to happen—to make any sense. You win this one, Hannah.
As I read from John 15 early in the night, it seemed as if the dimly lit words of the page faded into manila-colored oblivion as God crowded my mind with a startlingly clear picture. A thick vine—almost too thick to be a vine, for it was tree-like in nature—ascended as far as I could see into the sky. I was wrapping both my arms and legs tightly around the vine and I rested my head peacefully on one of my shoulders. Far below the thick vine was a raging fire. The fire enveloped the entire area below the vine and crept up to the point of hugging its circumference, yet the vine itself was never consumed. Despite the fact that all it would theoretically take for me to be consumed by the fire would be a slip of my feet or a failure of my own arm strength—an altogether possible occurrence, I now realize, as I have tried and failed to climb similarly constructed trees here in Cambodia—I felt absolutely no fear of falling off of the vine. It was as if my arms were glued to the vine, enough so that I had to assert little to none of my own strength to remain on the vine.
I have no doubt that God gave me a clear image of a vine because I had just read Jesus’ statement, “I am the true vine” (John 15:1), and it is highly likely that the fire represented hell, but over and above that, I want to allow my vision to retain its mystery until I gain more wisdom.
What was absolutely incredible to me, however—and I actually didn’t realize this until the following morning—was not that I had this clear vision, but that I had had it before. When I was a young boy—younger than ten years old, even—there was one reoccurring dream that I had quite often. This, too, is an odd occurrence, as I had (and have) very few reoccurring dreams—or even dreams that I can remember. In my childhood dream, I was grabbing firm to the top of the same thick, trunk-like, vine, with the same raging fire below me. Just like Tuesday night’s vision, I was aware that my life depended upon my staying on the vine, well above the fire. The difference, however, was the accompanying emotion.
When I was a child, the emotion I felt on the top of that vine was fear—fear that any second, if my strength gave out, I would fall into the fire. Even if my strength didn’t give out, the fire below could always starve me out up on that pole, resource-less and alone. On Tuesday night, however, I felt not fear, but peace. It was truly one of the most peaceful feelings I had ever felt—peace in knowing that I was beyond secure on the vine. I have no idea what to make of all of this. I want to be slow to make presumptions about a God whose “thoughts are higher than (my) thoughts”, but nevertheless, I smell God all over this connection.
The second vision I received involved children. Along a dirt road, and through dirt-floored villages stood, shoulder to shoulder, hundreds of children. Many were nameless, but many I recognized from this year and before—Pheck and Mai from Cambodia, Shaffiq from Uganda, Laxmi from Nepal, and myriads of other children from India and even Romania. Every one of them looked longingly out into the distance, though it seemed as if their senses of longing had all been significantly eroded by the stark reality they had come to know in the short years of their lives—the reality that nobody is coming for them.
I then saw, at first myself, then others (some of whom were people I didn’t even recognize), step forward and select random children from among the line. When a child was selected, a sparkling silver necklace was placed on his or her neck. It was almost as if they didn’t know what to do with the necklaces, and the narrative tension in and of itself was heavy—necklaces as expensive as these, by principle, shouldn’t be squandered on children who didn’t have the slightest idea what to do with that type of luxury.
Either God is at work or I have gone crazy. I can just picture it now—my Christian friends pumping their fists in celebration of God’s delight in liberally providing humans with a glimpse of what he sees, and my secular friends burying their heads in their hands and lamenting, with rolled eyes, another potentially good man ruined by the intoxication of the religious placebo effect. Either way, I thank God for giving me two visions that I cannot yet understand. When the time comes, however, to see these visions gloriously come to their points of manifestation, I look forward to providing a link back to this blog—from wherever the heck I will be—and celebrating divinely planted seeds, now blossomed.
