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Dreaming of Answers

Posted on Saturday, February 23, 2019

My wife and I have made it to our new city!  So far it has been a good experience; the people are very friendly and welcoming.  But at first I didn't think that was going to be the case.

Right after we landed in our country we needed to find our hotel before our domestic flight the next day.  It was 2:00am after we made it through immigration and customs, and we just wanted to sleep. We asked someone if they knew where the hotel was, and they had us pay for a cab.  However, the cab driver simply drove a loop around the terminal of the airport and then dropped us of again. The hotel was one floor above where we were when we got in the cab!  I was so frustrated. I thought, “these guys saw new foreigners and thought they could rip us off and mess around with us”! My natural tendency was to jump to so many negative conclusions and attach negative moral force to the actions of the locals.  

Then that night, the Lord gave me a dream.  

 

I was presented with a complicated math problem, and given the objective to solve it.  There was no time limit, I just needed to produce the solution. I was given one hint: there is a pattern that can be recognized that will help with completing the problem.  So, I went to work.

It felt like the longer I worked on it the farther away I was getting to my goal.  I became convinced that there was no pattern, yet I pressed on determined to solve the puzzle.  But, no matter how hard I tried, I could make no headway. After hours and hours of striving I finally decided to give up. I threw up my hands and prayed, “Lord, if you want me to see the answer, you’ll have to give it to me.  I cannot do this on my own.”

Suddenly, a clear and obvious pattern appeared.  Re Energized and now driven by faith, the solution quickly presented itself.  The Lord had answered my prayer and given my the answer.

 

And then I woke up.  And repented. I had been striving in my flesh to see the motivations behind the actions of the locals and my flesh pushed me toward negative assumptions.  But as I asked to Lord to illuminate the situation, I saw that they were actually being very hospitable and caring. The first person we asked about the hotel didn’t know where it was (it’s a brand new hotel), but he didn’t want to disappoint us so he said he knew where it was, and passed us on to the one person he was sure would know where it was- the cab driver.  And it worked!

Moving forward, keeping the lesson of this dream in mind, my hope is that as I experience new and different things in this culture my default will be to cry “father help me see”, and to give the benefit of the doubt to these people, as I seek to love them well.  

--Richard

 

Photo by Tim Foster on Unsplash

 

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