In October 2010, the first week that I started work at Adventures in Missions in Gainesville, I had one of the most vivid, haunting dreams I’ve ever had.
I was inside of a white van with other World Racers that were from different squads than my own. We were looking out of our window into a colony of severely deteriorated lepers. It was more appalling than I can describe. They were wrapped in gauzy rags, body parts falling off, and slowly – so very slowly – they were reaching out for us. They had all lost their tongues, the only sounds they could form were feeble, ceaseless moans. They were so hopelessly beyond repair, but they were still reaching out as if we could save them.
Unlike my real life, the thought of provision, medical attention, or even Holy Spirit miracles was not present in this dream at all. I was aware that there were no options for them at all, and I was horrorstruck that they were sure we could help them. I’d never been as mindful of my own helplessness. I was thankful in that moment for the van, because even if they were able to reach me, the window was between us. I didn’t have to be a part of their hell, of their hopelessness. I could stand on the perimeter, a clear wall between us. I had the ability to see their pain, but not actually become a part of it.
Normally in these situations, compassion would be my immediate response, but in this dream, I felt pure dread and absolute fear as they slowly advanced. Even if the window wasn’t a barrier, I was nimble compared to their sluggish position, and I could outmaneuver them so as not to be drawn in. And if they reached past the window somehow, dodging them was my plan. I had a choice in this chaos of sickness and absolute death.
Just as I believed the situation couldn’t be more grisly, it happened. Among the lepers, a woman appeared. I had no way of physically knowing she was a woman aside from the knowledge inexplicably given in dreams, because she was so burned that not one color or trace of hue could be seen other than a deep, charred blackness. She was mostly skeleton, but every inch of her bone was covered in a crumbly char. She looked like a piece of burned food, forgotten in the oven for hours on end. In her arms, she was holding a baby just as burned.
One look at her and I knew that she and the baby were dead. There was absolutely no way that anything could be so burned, so tortured, and have one trace of life left. It was a non-issue, just the way you would never imagine a pile of bones to have life in it.
And yet, to the greatest degree of my shock, I watched in stomach-wrenching horror as she moved. Her movements were so very slight, so very slow, that, at first, I thought I was imagining it. I kept telling myself, over and over, that there was no way that she could be alive. Absolutely no way.
But undeniably, she was moving. I couldn’t refute it, no matter how stubbornly I wanted not to acknowledge it. I felt a nausea in the dream that would carry on to my waking, a kind born of witnessing the deepest kind of horror.
The remains of her burned, blackened jaw were skeleton-slack. She crumbled as she moved. It took me a long moment of wide-eyed disbelief and revulsion before I realized what she was doing.
In the smallest strength imaginable, she was reaching her baby out to me.
And of all the horrors I had experienced, this was the greatest.
She was dead. The baby was dead. Whatever was animating them couldn’t be life. And with no voice, no words, just the slightest of movements, she reached out to me a baby so charred, so beyond hope, that I lost all composure.
I wept.
How could I, just me, with nothing, possibly dare to offer her any hope? Nothing was possible to save this child. I had no belief there was life even, and if there was, it was something that could not be sustained even by miracles.
And yet, she kept reaching the baby out to me…
Slowly.
So slowly I had to stare to see the movements.
I have rarely felt overpowered by a dream, and very rarely has one made me emotional to the point of tears, but this dream elicited both. I literally could not stop my thoughts or my tears as I recalled it over the next week, and it disturbed me greatly. I would literally break down at the mere recollection of the woman and her attempts beyond death to help her seemingly lifeless child.
I was very perplexed by the meaning of the dream. The ethnicity of the lepers was that of a southeast Asian nationality, and even though the woman in the dream had no distinguishing ethnicity at all, I felt that she and her baby were distinctly African. However, I wasn’t sure of the meaning at all.
During the Stirred conference, held over the weekend at AIM, I felt God directing me to seek out Seth Barnes and tell him my dream. So, after a session, I grabbed Seth and, outside the tent in the crisp night air, described to him in detail my dream. He listened intently before speaking. Although I deliberately left out the ethnicities of the lepers and the woman and baby, Seth told me that he felt that the lepers were representative of a nation like Cambodia, and the woman and baby of a war-torn African nation. I was astonished at what he said, and I knew that even though I didn’t know the details yet, God was confirming through Seth what I felt in the dream.
***
Last week, I walked into the children’s home where we are working during our time in South Sudan. I was immediately overwhelmed by the penetrating needs. They weren’t even hard to find.
The children are withdrawn and to themselves, evidence of abandonment and families divided by war.
I could go on about the need for better nutrition, clothing, medical care, and sleeping accommodations, but I left the place feeling overwhelmed.
Despite the many physical needs, I was burdened with the emotional state of the children. So many have stories I have not been told, stories that illustrate the carnage of war, the brokenness of families, the crushing blow of being one child too many. I know there are needs, and the needs are great, but the biggest absence was the identity that comes from knowing you are special, valued, and loved.
I left the children’s home with many more questions than answers. I was sure that these children needed a difference in their lives, but I was questioning if I had what it took to be that for them. I was wondering if all the needs that I saw would be able to be met, where the provision would come from, how I integrated into the meeting of needs. It was all overpowering.
That evening, as I was readying for bed, Seth called. I was honest in my confusion and open about my questions with him, letting him know that the needs were great and I was a little overwhelmed by it all.
I finished my processing with how withdrawn and self-isolating the children were when we first came, being products of war, broken homes, and many other heart-breaking situations. I said something like this:
“This nation has known so much war that these children’s grandparents and great-grandparents haven’t known peace. This country has been burned by the battles, and the fires of war have seared this land, the people, and the children. They don’t have families, they are alone and dealing with things on a national and personal level. It’s just so much to take in, to believe that I could help these children through what has happened to them, through the situations that have scarred them, through the loss of parents and family. I just don’t know where I fit into all of this pain.”
After a pause, Seth wisely said,
“Isn’t this just like your dream with the burned-up woman? Handing you her child?”
I think I answered quickly, but internally, I’ve been mulling that question over for more than a week now.
But, deeper still, I think I know the answer.
Because I think God already told me.
Like my dream, I have nothing to offer that could change something so horrific.
But unlike my dream, the Jesus in me, He does.
The Jesus in me does.
