Vision

I had two visions about the time I went forward in church to make my calling public. The first one was during a quiet time. I sensed women around me crying. There was deep wailing and grief, pain that went to their very core. I had the sensation on my shoulder of being wet with their tears, but it really wasn't. All I can say is it was a sense of it being that way. I didn't really hear the crying, but felt it.

Then a few weeks later I sensed one women crying, she wasn't a single woman, she represented many. She was crying like before and she was enveloped in darkness. Then there was a light, like a lamp that came and entered into the very core of her darkness and grief. I knew the lamp was Jesus. I feared the woman was me.

I know that my call has something to do with healing. I was given a picture, like Christ being in the furnace with Daniel's friends. Something that a friend of mine has been teaching me is to be willing to enter into other people's pain and grieve with them. I know He is telling me to allow myself to be vulnerable to people because it allows for healing and growth. It was why I got freaked out after I went forward in church, because I realize what going forward to answer my call meant. The Lord is asking everything of me, holding nothing back.

Pain is a funny thing, it either makes you stronger in the Lord or it breaks you. In the last few years I passed through an intense time of emotional pain and it seems to tap into a deep invasive pain beyond myself. Maybe it is because we are at war or that the news I search through each day is full of horror stories, often about what parents do to their children. There is a theme in it that tells of the innocent being brutalize without cause. The world is full of pain and it has so many faucets, no one really escapes. Our minds cannot take it in. We have a limited capacity to deal with it. Sometimes we are caught off guard and the pain comes roaring into our lives like a freight train. I think we when we experience suffering it can enlarge our capacity to deal with the pain experienced by others or it shuts us down. What I think God desires for our lives is for pain to become an open door into another person's life that can bring healing. It requires us to see pain as a gift for others and not a closed door of our heart.

God keeps working in my life, though the pain in my life is subsiding. I was asked to mentor a young lady who is in a difficult situation, homelessness. God opened this door because He trusted me to walk through my own pain. So He trusts me with the pain of another. I have been in contact with old friends who are in the midst great hardship and I consider myself a fellow traveler. I can look back at the vision and see that God is faithful. All this I write was intensified when I ran into one of my friends at church. As she hugged me while she cried, the tears from her face fell down onto my shoulder.

Psalm 43:3-5 (NIV)

Send forth your light and your truth,
let them guide me;
let them bring me to your holy mountain,
to the place where you dwell.

Then will I go to the altar of God,
to God, my joy and my delight.
I will praise you with the harp,
O God, my God.

Why are you downcast, O my soul?
Why so disturbed within me?
Put your hope in God,
for I will yet praise him,
my Savior and my God.