Are You Ready?

 Building on last week’s post of learning to hear God’s voice.

A few years ago, God gave me a strange dream and a visitation.  I say that with all trepidation for how presumptuous it sounds.  But this is the only dream I’ve ever had where I learned something new.  And I have spent (not enough) time since that time praying for guidance on what it means and what to do with it. You might suggest I've been afraid to get out of my comfort zone and using the "tell me what you want Lord" as an excuse not to move, and there may be something to that.

God showed me how he made Israel into one nation when they were slaves in Egypt, how the previous generations, from Abraham back to Adam, all the children each became their own nations, and often became enemies of one another.  But in Egypt, surrounded by a great Empire, the twelve sons of Israel became one.  And then in my dream, God told me that in the United States, we have the “opposite” situation.  Instead of being many brothers and sisters among a foreign power, every nation on earth lives in this one Nation.  We have this opportunity to learn how to love one another.

Not long after that, I was awakened in the middle of the night to the sound of a great wind in my bedroom and a terrible voice said, “I AM COMING.”  Now, the voice did not identify himself, offer any details about when, where or how, nor suggest what I should do.  But it seems pretty clear who it was.  What should we do to prepare for His Coming?  To be clear, I was awake when that happened.  And to emphasize, in no way was there any indication of when He might come (which seems “on brand”).  But it was true 2000 years ago and is true today that we should live like he’s coming back tomorrow.  What does that look like?  Let’s go to the Source:

“The one who stands firm to the end will be saved (Matt 24:13).”

Matt 24:45-47 “the faithful and wise servant…give(s) them their food at the proper time”.

Matt 24:48-51 “(the) servant is wicked and … begins to beat his fellow servants and to eat and drink with drunkards….He will cut him to pieces and assign him a place with the hypocrites”.

Matt 25:37-40 ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’

There is a lot of noise in the media and social media about voting for this side, supporting that person or group, protesting here, standing up there.  I do struggle with this because I do see wrong behavior from basically all our leaders.  And I do see ordinary people struggling to get by, struggling to get justice, struggling to find their ways too (just like I am).  I know the example of people we revere in history - MLK, Gandhi, Bonhoeffer.  And in the Bible, Paul, Peter, Stephen, James.  Of course, Jesus, but I am looking at people who are “only” fully human right now.  I don’t believe Jesus would advocate rebelling or protesting.  But I do believe he wants us to stand up for people who cannot stand up for themselves.  Which brings those modern martyrs back into the discussion.  

Specifically, now with a second person in Minneapolis protesting on behalf of illegal immigrants being rounded up and deported having been shot by federal agents, I have to ask what the right thing to do is. Clearly these illegals cannot stand up for themselves. And from all appearances, the vast majority of those being rounded up and deported have committed no other crime but to come here without following the rules. I am reminded of another person who paid a great price for protesting the rounding up of a scapegoated people: Corrie Ten Boom. She and her family hid Jews away from the Nazis for years before they finally caught them and put Corrie, her father and her sister in a concentration camp. Corrie would be the only one to survive it.

What I feel God telling me is to look around at the mess we are in, explore how we got here and, hopefully, offer some hope on where we go from here.  But I also suspect that there may be more to be done. We have this opportunity to learn how to love one another.

So no, I do not know the day or the hour.  Jesus said “only the Father knows”.  But whether it is tomorrow, next week, a decade from now or centuries from now, He Is Coming. Will I be ready?