Sea Dreams

I had another dream today after a rough night last night with anxiety.  When I went to sleep today (cause of the night-shift), I had a dream.  Usually, my dreams are nonsensical, but they have just enough story pathway in them to mark them solidly as mine.  This one though, while surreal, made a lot of sense to me...and I consider it a gift from my Heavenly Father.  It will never cease to humble and amaze me that God speaks my language.  I know that your time is limited, so you don't have to reply to this one.  Sometimes it just feels wrong to me though not to share something after I write it.  This was another of those times.

Just for background I should mention, if I never have before to you, that among my many other 'timidities' I have a fear of 'high water', ie: waterfalls, high waves, or being suspended a good distance above water.  Its from childhood, but it plays into this a bit, so I needed to mention it.  Also since childhood, I've harbored a fantasy of flying.  I've always wanted to fly.  As I grow older, I've felt more and more rooted to the ground by the problems and realities of life.  I guess we all have.

DREAMS OF THE SEA

I dreamed that I was a bird flying along an ocean pier.  In the background I could hear a loud-speaker droning on about the Titanic and the Mauritania and how this new ship was called the 'New Mauritania'.  I passed several ships looking at them at times from behind the glassed-in walls of the tour building, each ship bigger than the last.  They were huge and grand and imposing.  I flew on seeing the boardwalk and the fenced-off shore beneath me.  As I continued, the landscape beneath me began to change.  Flying beyond the boundaries of the sea-port and cities, the shore-line was less precise, and at times the ocean crashed against large black rocks beneath me that jutted into the sea.  The sea spray splashed high into the air and I could feel the gentle, cooling mist of it as I flew through its skyward arc on my set path.  The land grew more rough and rugged the further I traveled, ocean stretching on to ocean, shore-line to shore-line beneath me, sun rising and setting but my aerial road never changing.  There were times too when the sea rose very high and I saw walls of foamy water clashing together from both sides like a wall of powerful natural turbulence.  I knew I should fear, and tasted a twinge of it.  I knew also that I should change my path to veer aside or I would fly right into it.  But I didn't.  When I did close my eyes and fly through, all I felt was the fine, cool mist again that I had before.  The waters did not overwhelm, they fell beneath me, and I was able to fly on.  

Eventually, as the flight progressed, I flew over a colorful sea-side jungle.  I landed then and became human again, weak and mortal once more.  I walked for a time on a circular pathway with my sister - it was not unlike a nature preserve I guess, with the boundary fences and man-made paths.  But then, I knew I must take to flight again, something my family did not understand.  My sister rejoined our family, and I took to the air once more delighting in the freedom of the ocean air and exhilarating breezes.

As far as the dream went, that is pretty much its total course.  However, when I woke up, I glanced over at my a daily Bible Quote email that I get ('it was random') and read, "Be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God; and the peach of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus."  Philippians 4:6-7  It was a very clear and obvious message - the moral of my dream.

As I continued to reflect on this, I realized further that life, while we live it, is a constant ocean whose pathway we walk alongside.  While the terrain of circumstance may change around us, still we walk.  No, in Christ we don't walk, but fly.  As much as things change and move on at a speed we're not always comfortable with, the creator of the storm and sea and the winds keeps us up and helps us to fly on.  And when the high waters do come, as they often will, they do not overcome us.  They are, as we see in time, simply light, refreshing mists that purify us as we move on, reminders that nothing can separate us from His love or overwhelm us completely here on earth.  God promises this so many places in scripture.  My favorite has always been the verses of Isaiah 43.  (but the next several chapters in Isaiah are absolutely BEAUTIFUL too, up through 46.  Promises from God to His previous children.  Sunrise and sunset, someday we will fly above a shore far greater than these...

 

-Kaylie