The Dream I Have Never Described

It was seventeen years ago and he can still describe the floor.

That is the detail that gets him. Not the big part of it. The floor, which was a particular kind of tile, in a room he has never been in, and which he could draw for you now if you gave him a pencil.

He woke up at about four in the morning and he sat on the edge of the bed for a long time and then he went and stood in the kitchen in the dark, and by the time it got light he was a different man about one specific thing in his life.

Seventeen years. He has never described it to anybody.

Not his wife. Not the man he prays with on a Thursday who knows more about him than anyone alive. Not once, in seventeen years, in any conversation, in any language.

And the reasons stack up neatly and they are all reasonable.

It was a dream, and people have dreams, and he is a sensible man who knows exactly what a dream is and how the brain works at four in the morning and what a coincidence looks like.

He does not want to be the sort of person who tells other people about his dreams. He has met that person. Everybody has met that person.

And there is the third reason, which arrived later and is the strongest of the three: seventeen years of not saying it has made saying it enormous. A thing kept for one week is a story. A thing kept for seventeen years has become a confession, and confessions are heavy to make.

So let me ask you.

What did you wake up from that you have never once put into words?

Elihu named the night, and named the not-noticing too

There is a long speech in Job by a younger man called Elihu, and I am not going to claim more for him than the text does, because Job is a difficult book and people build far too much on the speeches.

But there is a sentence in it that stands on its own, and it stands because it describes something everybody recognizes.

For God does speak, now one way, now another, though no one perceives it. In a dream, in a vision of the night, when deep sleep falls on people as they slumber in their beds.Job 33:14 and 15

Read the clause in the middle, the one about nobody perceiving it. You are not a careless man for having missed something, and the Holy Spirit is not confined to the hours a man happens to be awake.

Two things in that, and the second one is the one you need.

Now one way, now another. God is described as varying His method. Not one channel. Not a single approved route that everything must come through in order to be counted.

And then: though no one perceives it.

That clause is doing something remarkable. It is saying that the ordinary human response to God speaking is to miss it. Not to reject it. To not notice, or to notice and not register, or to register and then, some hours later, quietly reclassify it as something else.

The Bible expects that. It says so plainly, in the middle of the sentence, without any judgement attached.

Hear where you stand, my friend, seventeen years on.

You are not a sensible man who nearly made a fool of himself. Scripture names the night as one of the ways God speaks and says in the same breath that people routinely do not perceive it, and the Spirit has not once been limited to the channels a careful man would approve.

Now, I want to be careful in the way that this house is always careful, and you would want me to be.

I am not going to tell you what your dream was. I do not know. Nobody reading this knows, and anybody who tells you they can interpret a thing they have not been told is selling something.

Nothing here is asking you to build anything on it, or to act on it, or to tell anybody it was from God. That is not the ask and it never has been.

The ask is much smaller. Stop treating the fact that you cannot classify it as proof that it was nothing.

Those are two different judgements and you have been running them together for seventeen years. I do not know what that was is honest. Therefore it was nothing is a conclusion, and you did not have the evidence for it then and you do not have it now.

The word says God speaks in one way and then another, and the Spirit is not confined to the hours a man is awake.