I want to share something cool with you about some of the ways God has been dealing with me. Just before Christmas 2020, God gave me a dream in which I came to a cross-roads. The path to the left was a beautifully paved path, winding through a butterfly meadow. Birds were singing, and there was even a rainbow! But the path to the right? That was a hard path. It led steeply downhill, and into a dark and scary forest, like Mirkwood from The Lord of the Rings. Also, the path itself? Terrible. Full of rocks. A difficult descent. Nope, Nope, Nope! But in the dream, Jesus was standing at the crossroads, and reaching out His hand to walk with me down the hard path and into the Forest. But it was clear in the dream that I was free to choose...
The next morning, I was praying about the dream, and God gave me two verses, both in The Message. The first one, Lamentations 3:2, He reminded me of:
He took me by the hand
and walked me into pitch-black darkness.
The second passage I opened at random to. Jeremiah 1:11-12:
GOD'S Message came to me:
"What do you see Jeremiah?"
I said, "a walking stick- that's all."
And GOD said, "Good eyes! I'm sticking with you.
I'll make every word I gave you come true."
What do you need on a steep rocky downhill path? A walking stick, and a companion. Jesus was offering me both!
It's also fascinating to me that God not only gave me these passages to confirm the dream, but He also controlled which version of the Bible I grabbed. In the NIV, the New International Version, the second passage reads like this:
The word of the LORD came to me:
"What do you see. Jeremiah?" "I see the branch of an almond tree," I replied.
The LORD said to me, "You have seen correctly,
for I am watching to see that my word is fulfilled."
And then the translator's note says:
The Hebrew for "watching" sounds like the Hebrew for "almond tree."
Isn't that cool? God was making a play on words in the Hebrew when he gave the vision to Jeremiah! But in His dealings with ME, He knew I needed a walking stick and not an almond branch. He also knew that the NIV Bible I had with me didn't have the translator's note, so he had me open to that passage in The Message. Exactly what I needed.
A full year passed, and I was now in the hospital with Covid Pneumonia. And God brought this dream to mind. I was in that Forest now! The Covid forest. And I was truly frightened. And then, He gave me an attitude check. Early morning on December 26, as I was proning and crying, He brought to mind the waterfall scene from the movie Apocalypto, of all things! He impressed on me that this was HIS Covid forest. I am his child, and He was walking with me in HIS forest. So I need to not be afraid. (You can read about it and watch the clip of that movie scene He showed me in my Facebook post that day.)
"He took me by the hand and walked me into pitch-black darkness." Down the hard path into His Covid forest. His territory. And then He led me safely out.
God is good.
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