Bad English & Bad Dreams.
Have you ever noticed that, while trying to communicate in a foreign language, your English takes a nosedive? I noticed it quite a bit while I was in Senegal -- one of the first days after we’d returned to Boise I was talking to my parents and said a sentence that was so fractured we just busted into laughter. It would have made perfect sense a few days before with sand swirling around us, but in their basement, surrounded by the trappings of America, it sounded terrible!
I realized it had happened again last night while conversing with someone who spoke English well. My sentences were fractured and my phrases were out of order and I found myself getting flustered. I don’t know how bi- or tri-lingual folks switch back and forth with such regularity without their heads exploding!
After my Bad English experience, I went to sleep and was having a rather normal dream -- something about driving and the mall and my family -- when I felt like I was sucked into another dream. I was in Senegal, but there was an ocean and I was a small boy <you know how dreams are!>. Anyway, something bad happened, I can’t remember exactly what, but I almost got caught by a huge wave and drowned.
Then the dream rewound and replayed in slow motion and I was seeing all the events that had taken place to arrange it. Toward the end I saw myself <again, as the small boy> standing near the water. One of the Senegal missionaries was floating behind me, causing all these complex series of events to happen. I saw him whipping up the storm and then arranging the distraction so that I turned my back on the water, then he floated up behind me on a big wave and had his arms outstretched, getting ready to drown me.
At the last second I turned and was saved somehow, but I saw the look on the face of the missionary -- and all of a sudden it was like things clicked into place and I knew it wasn’t really the missionary. We locked eyes and he had an expression of such anger and downright evil that I was immediately terrified. I shouted out Jesus and woke myself up shouting it a second time. It felt like my entire body came unclenched all of a sudden, but for a couple minutes every time I closed my eyes I could see that face.
You know, we talk about the enemy being a crouching lion, intent on devouring us. But I have to admit I don’t often think of him as he really is -- pure evil, trying every which way to harm us. Arranging events to bring about our destruction. What I love is that, in terms of that dream, it didn’t matter all the work he’d put in to arrange things to kill me, God was sovereign and at the last second popped in just the right event to turn me around and save me.
Isn’t it just like that in real life?
