I thought this was a great approach, considering my knowledge of dreams, and thus, I never put any more thought into it. Quite often I would in fact share my dream with those involved, but after a few days the dream was out of my mind and gone forever.
Then, about a month ago, this idea of God speaking to us through dreams really became apparent in my life. Everywhere I turned, “dreams” kept popping up. It seemed like no matter who I had lunch with, they all had to start our conversation with, “I HAVE to tell you about this dream I had last night! It was so crazy.”
I knew God was repeating this dream phenomenon for a reason. So I prayed a little bit about what this all meant, and again waited patiently for God to explain.
Then one weekend I was in my zone at Barnes and Nobles, where I was searching up and down the Christian relationship section, looking for my next good read. As I was heavily focused on all the dating and marriage books, I fumbled across a beautiful book called “Dream Language: The prophetic power of dreams, revelations, and the spirit of wisdom.”
Alas, fate was mine! For one obvious reason, it was dreams. But for another thing, I noticed the title contained the word “prophetic.” You see, one of my dearest friends discovered this summer that she has the gift of prophecy. Since then, her and I have been on a journey to better figure out what this looks like and how she can more effectively use the gift God has given her.
So I grabbed the book and before I could turn to the back cover, I knew that God had laid this book in my path for a reason. It wasn’t just for me, but Julie too. Also, dreams hadn’t just been coming up in my life so that I could learn a lesson, but so Julie could understand too.
After thumbing through the book to make sure there were no “occultic practices” as we so often judge books with, I bought the book along with several others and left the store overly excited to start reading!
Julie and I talked about it, and we decided she was going to read the book first, and then I would receive it after her. So I gave her the book, and began anxiously reading some other biblical book about marriage and relationships.
Here’s where a twist of God’s flavor comes in. He didn’t want Julie to read the book first! Over and over again, dreams kept coming up, both in my sleep, and in my conversations. My friends were having visions, my family was dreaming revelations, and I was desperate to understand this language.
Fed up with waiting for my turn (it had only been a week,) I visited Julie and asked if I could read the book first instead. She was more than happy, because she had since then started several book-based bible studies, and was completely overwhelmed with reading.
Yesss...I reclaimed my book and went home to instantly read the first third of the book. How much I had to soak in! There was such truth, and new insights, and deeper understandings. I read the first third in one weekend, and then God told me to put the book down and cultivate the lessons learned over the course of the next week, so that’s what I did.
At first I was very hesitant with every new idea the book presented. Holy Spirit..er, uh...I’m Southern Baptist, and I don’t know how much of that I believe. Prophecy huh? Well...I’ll just have to check that out with scripture first.
Thank God for teaching me to test and discern every spirit before taking it in! As I worked my way through the book, I carefully looked up each of the scriptures; testing them and studying them so I could get the full meaning.
Just as God intended, I grew and strengthened my faith with each new discovery. Wow--why doesn’t our church do this? It’s biblical! Why haven’t I asked for dreams and revelations before? Obviously God speaks through them! How is it that an entire culture and generation of people has totally discredited God’s intimate communication with us through dreams?
Fortunately for me, God, James Goll, and the Holy Spirit are leading me through discovery of this beautiful process, and next time I will share with you a much shorter post, describing the book in its entirety.
The next post will be my review of this interesting book.
How do you stumble across good reads? What makes you decide to pick up a book?
Do you ever feel like God literally places books in your hands?
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