Whatever the case may be, it's never the same circumstances. And they are always there.
Sometimes - often - the dream is very brief. This time it seemed to be much longer. They had arrived, although under what pretenses, I'm not sure. They stayed with me for a number of days, and I was sharing with them how I came to be called into ministry - something that I've spoken of before, but in this dream I was filling in a detail I've missed.
Years ago, I was a part of a youth group that traveled down to inner city Chicago, to an organization called Inner City Impact, which is a mission that reaches out to at-risk and impoverished youth in precarious circumstances, and conducts after-school programs, tutoring, distance learning, camping, scholarships, food bank support, etc. Many of the trips I took down to ICI were in the capacity of being a camp counselor, and we travelled directly to the camp site to help out. The final couple of years we went down, we spent a few days in Chicago itself, doing some service projects at ICI, meeting some of the kids that had been at camp in previous years, and then we took them out to camp for the week.
This experience was foundational, and shaped my direction in life for years to come. Even as I write this, I'm still on that same trajectory of serving the Lord, and though it started with short-term missions, the work I'm doing now is no less important or significant.
But I digress. At the time of the dream, I'm not sure why it was so important for me to convey to them what I was doing, or where my roots in ministry lay, but as I write this, it comes to mind that they are in ministry also; they found themselves drawn to mission work, and I believe they are still working as a missionary to some degree. Or, perhaps they are not working as directly with missions as they used to be, and perhaps this is unsettling them at this time. My message to them, if they are reading this, is to reflect on Abraham's trajectory. The Lord called him from a strange land, and told him to start traveling to a place that He would eventually reveal to him. Abraham's journey took him to many places and many stops, and even though all around him, Abraham's friends and family were acknowledging that the places they stopped were good places to be, the Lord had other plans for him. Abraham's journey was not complete until the Lord deemed it complete.
My words are meant to be kind. When I started out in ministry, I never thought that I'd end up in the work situation that I find myself in at the present. When I started out on the path to being a Youth Pastor, as I imagined was my life trajectory following the very positive experiences with ICI, I never imagined that I would be working with Seniors, in a company that professed to be a Christian domicile, but is apparently run from the top as though the word "Christian" didn't mean that business decisions had to be made with the Lord guiding those decisions.
And maybe the reason for dreaming what I did, was not for "them" to hear and be comforted or spurned to other ministry opportunities, but rather for me to see and realize that this short stop at the senior's home, though it be a great learning opportunity and a great mission field, is not my final stop either. Perhaps the Lord is preparing me to be uprooted once again, to continue on to the place He is going to show me.
I don't know why I dream these dreams. It'll probably make sense much, much later.
I think I'll end this one here. There's much more I could say, but the dream isn't fresh in my memory. I don't know if anything else I can say will be relevant or connected to this most recent dream.
Until the next time, then.
-UM
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