A DREAM TO THE SECOND POWER

What did it mean when Jean and I had the same frightful dream in the same night?

Morning in Manila is always muggy. The noisy air conditioner had kept the bedroom cool, but I awoke soaked with perspiration.
"What a nightmare," I thought.
The troubling, yet impelling dream was still in vivid detail in my mind. There seemed a sense of significance I couldn't shake.
In the dream I was a captive of angry men. Something I had written had incensed them and they were taking revenge.

"What if something like that would happen?" I wondered.
I looked across the pillow at my wife Jean. Her sleep was troubled.


The ancient air conditioner clunked on and off. When it ran it vibrated and made the metal window frames buzz.
Jean could handle anything but I hated to think of her ever having to face such a problem.
While I watched her, she awoke. She rolled toward me and wrapped her arms tightly around my neck.
What she said startled me.
"Honey, I just had the most awful dream. It was about you!" she wept.
Somehow I knew what she had dreamed. The room filled with an immediate presence of the supernatural as she continued.
"Oh, Dave,” she sobbed, "It was horrible. They had arrested you for something you had written."
Other details she added matched my dream exactly.
"Jean, I just dreamed the same thing!"
We looked anxiously into each other's eyes and silently held the embrace tighter. I know her mind was racing like mine was.
Surely having the same dream was not a coincidence--or could it have been.
If it was of supernatural origin was it God preparing us or the devil trying to frighten us into inaction?
I knew I would never forget the event.

In the dream I never did succumb to the captors' torture and never said anything that would grieve the Lord. Yet, throughout the dream I kept feeling I had gone the limit of my endurance and I would very soon say whatever they wanted me to say.

I dressed and went downstairs to the office. On an old steno pad the kids had scribbled on I let my pen explore the dream and my thoughts as I tried to sort through all the spiritual issues involved.

Telling it in the third person, my pen sped the words across the pages:

Soon it would start.
He knew his captors would be able to break his body and his mind with their drugs and torture. Fear had already brought a quivering tenseness to his body.
The captive swallowed, looked his interrogator in the eyes and spoke.
"I know that soon you can have me screaming in pain. Your drugs and torture can take away my reason and control.
"But, it would be your own deed that speaks back to you from that pain--not my reasoning mind.
"No doubt you can make me curse my family, even my mother, or worse yet maybe even I would grieve my Savior Jesus. But know this--it would not be me that was speaking. That part of me that is real and sane will have its refuge in Christ.
"Do you think that just because you bludgeon a mother's son into cursing her that she would not wrap her arms around his broken body and say through her tears, 'I love you, Son. Don't worry, I know that it wasn't you that spoke!'
"My Heavenly Father knows my heart right now while it is truly me that speaks.
"How much more than a mother would He forgive me even if I said the things you want?"
The captive talked fast. There was one more thing to say before pain exploded in his mind. It wouldn't be easy to say but he had to.
"Just as my Heavenly Father will forgive me, so do I forgive you for what you are doing to me. God will even forgive you if you ask Him."
Their eyes locked. And held.
His body trembled as he braced for the onslaught of pain that would surely come now.
The moment seemed to last forever. He watched his captor's eyes as they stared unseeing into his own.
The captive's words had stunned the torturer. They took him face-to-face with his own heart.
Tighter and tighter the captive's muscles tensed as he readied for the electric fire of pain.
He saw the captor's eyes suddenly narrow into blazing hatred.
And in a burst of fury it started.
The blast of pain seared through every nerve and thundered in his mind. It was like the pain had pulled all of his mind into suspense in the present. There was no past, no future, only an unending duration of pain.
Nothing really changed, yet it seemed to the captive like he had become just an observer of his own body's torture. He--the real part of him--was someplace else. With Someone else.
Aloft in Christ.
He knew that down there his body was in agony, but up here there was a calm and a warm knowing feeling.
In that warm presence of the Heavenly Father he was standing as a forgiver of his fellowmen, and as one who was himself forgiven.
"Don't worry, my Son, you didn't betray me.
"Just stay here with me."

As I sit here at a computer keyboard years have passed. These words could almost be some melodrama plot from a rampant imagination.
But they're not.
I still do not know the dream's significance, but I know it was not melodrama when an officer of the KGB risked his life and mine to meet me and tell me of his love for Jesus.
There was no sense of theater whenever I met with church leaders in brutally hostile anti-Christian areas. Often, we wept together as we remembered the ones who had been imprisoned and tortured to death since they came to our last meeting.
I have known the terror of being taken captive (They were after ransom. When they learned I had no money and nobody would pay for me they let me go).
An African employee--a relief truck driver--was captured and tortured for six weeks. What a testimony this one is! He led most of his fellow captives to the Lord.
I have heard an informant's spine-chilling whisper in my ear that there was a contract out on my life.
Since the dream it has been years of travel into some of the countries of the world most hostile to America and even more hostile to the Gospel.
God has called me to hard places.

Now, as I write this, I still do not know what all it means, but long ago I had to deal with it and have decided. Whether it means anything or not, I will never let the dream intimidate me.
What I know for sure is that this dream is a threshold I've had to step over. It seems important now to make a public statement on this.
As long as I have life and strength to do it, I'll go wherever He wants me to go, and I will write whatever God's Holy Spirit would use my pen to say--anytime, anywhere!

"My tongue is the pen of a ready writer..." Psalms 45:1