Waiting For The Dream

Since the eleventh of April, every night, and he can tell you the date because he wrote it in the back of a notebook.

He is not a man who invents things. He wants that said. He has had two dreams in his life that he would describe as more than dreams, one at nineteen and one about eleven years ago, and he has told perhaps four people about either of them, and he has never once built a decision on a feeling.

Which is exactly why this has him.

There is a thing in front of him. It is not dramatic. It involves a move, and a person, and a reasonable amount of money, and every practical consideration points the same way, and three people whose judgement he trusts have all said versions of yes.

He has asked for a dream about it since April.

Nothing. Ordinary dreams. A recurring one about a corridor at his old school that he has had since he was thirty and which means nothing at all.

Here is where it has arrived, and it took until about June.

He has started reading the silence. And the reading goes: God is not saying no, because there is no no. And He is not saying yes, because there is no yes. Therefore He is saying wait. Therefore waiting is obedience.

And so he has done nothing since April, and has felt, in a low steady way, faithful about it.

Last week the person involved asked him, gently, whether there was anything he needed from her, and he said no, not at all, and could not say the true sentence, which is: I am waiting for a dream I have not had for five months.

They went forth, and the signs came after

Sit down under that vine a minute, because there is one verse at the very end of Mark, and the order of the clauses in it is the entire teaching.

And they went forth, and preached every where, the Lord working with them, and confirming the word with signs following. Amen.Mark 16:20

They went forth. Then the Lord worked with them. Then signs, following.

Read that sequence again, because it is the opposite of the sequence you have been running.

The going is first. The confirming is second. And the word the Holy Spirit chose for the signs is following, which is a word about position: behind, after, in the wake of something that has already moved.

Nobody in that verse waited to be confirmed before they went. There would have been nothing to confirm.

Hear this at your own table. You are not being disobedient by moving, and the written word is what settles it. Scripture puts the going before the confirming and calls the signs following, and the Holy Spirit is the one who worked with them as they went, so the confirmation was never the starting gun.

Now let me be careful, because you are careful and this category could be handled badly by somebody in a hurry.

Nothing here promises you a dream. You may never have another one. The two you have had are yours and they were real and there is no formula that produces a third, and anybody who tells you there is one is selling something.

And the absence of a sign is not a verdict on you. Five months of ordinary dreams says nothing whatever about your standing, your faith or your hearing. What is written never once makes the absence of a sign into evidence about the person waiting, and the Spirit of God does not withhold confirmation as a test of anybody's sincerity.

Now the reading you have been doing, because that is where the five months actually went.

You took silence and made it a message. That is the move, and it is the one to examine.

Silence is not a third answer. It is the absence of an answer, and turning it into wait requires an inference, and you made that inference in June and have been treating it as a word since.

Hear this too. You are not being made to guess, and Scripture is what says so. What is written gives you the ordinary means: the practical considerations that all point one way, the three people whose judgement you trust who have all said yes, and a word that puts the going first. The Holy Spirit works in exactly those, and He has been working in them since April while you waited for a different medium.