Dreamt

Sunday 5/25/2014 5:47 AM

The opening verse of Psalm 126, my psalm for the week, is, “When the Lord restored the fortunes of Zion, we were like those who dreamed.  Our mouths were filled with laughter, our tongues with songs of joy.”  Those verses bring an image of someone describing something wonderful, only to be brought back down to earth by someone else saying, “Only in your dreams.”

Today I read an excerpt from The Reasons of the Heart, by John S. Dunne.  He writes, “‘There is a dream dreaming us,’ a Bushman once told Laurens Van der Post.  We are part of a dream, according to this, part of a vision.  What is more, we can become aware of it.  Although we are far removed from the Bushmen and their vision, it seems we can indeed come to a sense of being dreamed, being seen, being known.  Our mind’s desire is to know, to understand; but our heart’s desire is intimacy, to be known, to be understood.  To see God with our mind would be to know God, to understand God; but to see God with our heart would be to have a sense of being known by God, of being understood by God.”

When I was a child my parents attended a church of the Christian Reformed denomination.  We attended worship services twice on Sunday with Sunday School sandwiched in between.  Sunday School was mostly learning the stories of the Bible during my younger years.  As I grew older I went to catechism classes, where we were taught the doctrines of the church.  I would say that I knew God with my mind.  I knew about God but my life and faith seemed robotic, as if I were acting out some prewritten script on the stage of life.  I wanted more than that.  I think I desired the intimacy about which Dunne wrote.  Thank God that when I was thirty-eight the Spirit of God prompted me to begin regularly reading the Bible.  Before I would begin reading each day I prayed that God would reveal himself to me and suddenly I began to see God with my heart.  For the first time in my life I felt as if God was a real person walking with me each day, someone with whom I was sharing my life.  That intimate heart-knowledge for which I longed was suddenly real.  The Bushmen would say that I have become aware of being dreamt, of being seen, of being known.  It is good.