Hope Without Limits

and that’s a very good thing.  Why?  Because I surrender to His goodness.

Picture from:  God’s Surprising Treasures

It’s been about 3 months that I have been having dreams that sharply contrast two things.  First, how I have been living and by that I mean the beliefs from which I’ve been living.  Second, how I could be living if I accept surrendering what has been familiar for new paradigms supplied by my Heavenly Father.

There is no shame in any of it, but rather opportunity to exchange the familiar for the unfamiliar.  Does that make you uneasy?  It’s OK if it does.  It did me.  Because within a matter of days of having a dream there would be real-life opportunities to choose from which paradigm I was going to live.  The rubber was definitely meeting the road on my journey of connection.

This journey has taken me on a rapid descent into very deep, undiscovered places in my own heart that have carried a level of pain that has defined how I interact with my world without me having a cognitive clue of its covert actions.   This “secret agent” in my midst had an arsenal of weapons for self-protection … fear, anger and isolation.

A couple of the images from my dreams are:

1.  I have to travel through an extremely dangerous slum at the foundation of where I have lived to get rid of the trash.
2. I get on a bus that I thought would take me to a safe place but then a slip cover is pulled off of the bus after I am on it and I realize there is no way I want to go where this bus is taking me.

I journaled each of these dreams after they occurred.  Each time as I journaled, “the rest of the story” would be revealed to me.

1. I saw myself go down the elevator to the foundation of where I was living.  When the door opened there was a HUGE golden angel that emanated light waiting for me.  He was pointing towards the slums, but as he pointed they changed.  They parted and everything became covered in gold.  Where they had parted, right in the center I could see a very small child that looked alone, abandoned.  There was nothing in the way – no darkness, no danger, nothing that could stop this angel, huh and me, from picking her up and taking her out of there.  Even she was covered in gold.  She is so very tiny, not even sure she is an infant – but very alive.  I heard: “What if you started every day, every moment from a place of supply and abundance rather than from a place of lack?”  I saw the angel pick-up the infant and literally place her in my chest/heart.  I heard “she belongs here, and you belong here” – in the embrace of this huge golden angel.  Oh my – that ’s YOU, isn’t it Jesus!!

2. I saw myself lifted out of the bus by Your 2 huge hands, scooping me up, like someone would scoop up water to drink.  I heard “let’s get you out of here and put you here”.  I then saw myself where I’ve seen myself so many times embraced by Jesus on his lap, with both of us sitting in your heart Abba.  Here there truly is nothing to worry about.  Here we can take one moment and each situation as it happens safe and with Your Presence, wisdom itself, to guide us.  Don’t have to apply a “one-size fits all protective guard” of anger, isolation, separation, distrust to protect myself from betrayal. 

My Heavenly Father revealed me to me in my dreams, the paradigms from which I’d been living and where they would take me if I continued “riding” them.  As I journaled, He revealed the opportunity He was offering me in exchange.  Beautiful right?  Indeed it is.  But, beautiful enough to choose in the midst of a real-life experience that occurred concurrently which triggered internal alarms of betrayal and danger?

Yes.

I was walking at sunrise, tears flowing from the real-life experience when I heard “why would you want to live from here (the dangerous slum, lack and isolation) when you could live from here” – where He had turned everything in the slum to gold, beauty and abundance and placed me in His embrace.

I started to laugh as I realized – He was not asking me to lay down my weapons of fear, anger and isolation to sacrifice myself, He was asking me to exchange my weapons for connecting these deep places of my heart to Him and SURRENDER TO HIS GOODNESS!!