As a little girl and young woman I use to dream a lot.  Most nights I would wake from a dream attempting to scream or scared out of my mind because of what I had experienced in the dream.  Some nights I would stay up just so I would not have to dream.  I know now where those dreams came from and today rarely have a dream that produces fear.  I still dream and believe the dreams I now dream hold meaning.

I recently had a dream about purchasing real estate.  The dream itself was about a faulty foundation on a building I was touring.  For whatever reason I was looking at this place and the realtor person was with me pointing out various features.  I was oohing and aweing over the place and feeling really good about the possibility of such a great piece of property.  I was enamored until she showed me the one negative.  What she said to me was, “this would be a great place except for the snakes”.  Now I don’t know about you but I am NOT a lover of any kind of snake.  Big or little, poisonous or not; I think the only good snake is a dead one.

I quickly asked where these were and she pointed to the floor and said “they are there under the floor boards in the foundation”.  I looked down to where she pointed at an opening in the boards and sure enough there they were.  Through the holes in the floor I could see the heads and writhing bodies with their markings as they slithered past.  After I woke I could not shake the thought that God was trying to speak to me about certain things I had let creep in and set up in the foundation of my heart.  Some things that if left unattended would reproduce vile contemptible things and erode the beauty and quality of the home he has made there.

As I sat there in my chair in the dark wee hours of the morning talking to God about what he had shown me; He quietly began to minister to those long ago forgotten heart wounds created by various life events and circumstances.  Wounds that I had allowed the enemy access to at the time because of ignorance and my neglected relationship with God.  Wounds that the enemy used to infiltrate my heart and speak untrue things about the Love and sovereignty of God.  Wounds that were healed but a mind that remembered and a heart that had stubbornly held on to those untrue things.

God revealed that while I believed His word as truth, I also believed that He had failed me at some of the most critical turning points in my life.  That somehow my prayers were not strong enough, not good enough or not powerful enough to move the hand of God.  I had bought into the lies fed me by the enemy at some of my most vulnerable times.  And I had allowed these lies to take up camp against what I knew to be true of God.  In my ignorance I had given the enemy an ear and in turn those untrue things began to create distance between me and my heavenly father.

It began showing up in my prayer time, in my devotional time and in the time I gave to sit before God listening to His reply.  It began showing up in my lack of time and attention to His word.  It manifested into an apathetic state of fake worship and a brave face put forth for others to see.  It revealed itself in quick “Christianese” that rolled off the tongue but was not felt deep in my heart.  It seeped out into the relationships around me because the love I felt in my heart for God was shallow and riddled with doubt.

As the distance between us grew, I begrudgingly and sparingly spent time in His word and in His presence; mostly out of a sense of duty but not out of Love.  I questioned why he wasn’t there, why he was silent when I needed him the most.  I could not understand why God would not speak to me.  Nor did I recognize the plan of the enemy to create such a disparity in my heart; between what I believed and what I had experienced, a chasm of doubt to the degree that he hoped I would give up on God.

It was there in those quiet early hours as the sun began to peek through the trees off my back deck creating a breathtaking red, yellow, orange sunrise that God exposed the plot of the enemy to destroy our relationship.  It was there in the splendor of His beauty that I discovered a Love that never failed me.  It was there in his presence that he wrapped His Love around me and filled in the chasm of doubt with His truth.  It was there I discovered a powerful and limitless God that can and WILL bring good from those seemingly bad things.  It was there my heart surrendered and I handed over all those untrue things.  It was there He lovingly restored our relationship.

Copyright © 2017 Melanie McKinley. All Rights Reserved.