FEAR FACTOR versus RUBY SLIPPERS

I woke up recently in a state of panic. I was wondering how long I could hold my breath.

It was a very strange dream. I was watching a boy holding onto a rope underwater, with weights on his feet in a deep pool, like one of those fear factor reality shows that I detest. He was running out of air and needed to come up badly but the weights on his feet were dragging him down. It sure looked like an impossible situation. I was sitting alone, outside the glass tank.

I always change the channel if something like that comes on, but my only option in the dream was to wake up and try to shake it off. So I just lay there for awhile and started praying.

Sometime later, I was scouting around on the web and stumbled across an interesting site on the meanings of dreams. Hmmm. That triggered the vision of that awful night, so I typed in some key words and read this under the section on common nightmares…

To see someone drowning in your dream, suggests that you are becoming too deeply involved in something that is beyond your control. Alternatively, it represents a sense of loss in your own identity. You are unable to differentiate who you are anymore.

Suddenly, I wondered if that’s why I had the dream in the first place! Was it about the conflicts I've been facing over my property? relationships? work? or my seeming inability to write and do ministry fulltime the way I want? There are a number of frustrating questions in my life right now, and situations I can't change. I'm literally fighting town hall and yes, I suppose I feel sorta helpless, like I'm being weighted down.

Sure makes you think. Especially the part about identity and being unable to understand who you are anymore. Now that one makes a lot of sense. For months I've been trying to explain to friends how I feel like a one-legged freak who doesn't know how to stand anymore.

How exactly are you supposed to learn how to live as a widow? How do you revert to being single after so many years? I don't think the same. All my habits and patterns and my whole framework of functioning is accustomed to a dual process. The void is palpable in my mind. Where do you check yourself in for social rehab?

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see that I’m feeling helpless, imbalanced, and handicapped in some ways. But that dream emphasized an interesting perspective. Notice that I wasn't the one drowning. Rather, I was the spectator! Maybe that's the writer in me. I'm an observer in my own life. It's as though I'm waiting to see what God will do. Somewhere in there, I still feel safe.

Maybe that's the ultimate in mental release. I was watching through that plate of glass, safely seated on some sort of bleachers. In many ways, I would be unaffected by the outcome of that poor boy, and yet I was involved, and awoke in a nervous sweat to discover it was all just the workings of my mind. And just as easily as the "show" was created and observed through glass, it was halted. All I had to do was open my eyes!

The other night I caught the end of the Wizard of Oz. After all her efforts to find her way back to Kansas, even after killing a wicked witch and risking life and limb, the Good Linda appeared and said that she had the ability all along. She could go home whenever she wished.

"Why didn't you tell her?" the friends demanded to know.

"She had to learn it for herself," she said kindly.

I've always loved the Wizard of Oz, but on this particular night I was taken by that simple lesson. There are some things that we struggle to find, expend great effort and energy trying, and then come to the end of ourselves and realize, poof! It was right there all along.

The power, the promise, the way home, right at our fingertips, or maybe in our ruby slippers.


Dear Lord, maybe one of these days, I'll wake up to find that my reality has changed. The drama and dangers of fear factor victims will be replaced by powerful resources.

Open my eyes to behold your truth. Grant that I realize the inherent power and blessing you've given, rather than dwelling on flying monkeys and black forests. Give me peace amidst apple trees that smack you or the green-faced witches that try to snatch away your puppy.

Guide me on this yellow brick road to the place that I learn what you want me to learn.

Bring me home, dear Lord.

There's no place like home!

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"His divine power has given us everything we need for life and godliness through our knowledge of him who called us by his own glory and goodness. Through these he has given us his very great and precious promises so that through them you may participate in the divine nature and escape the corruption in the world..." 2 Peter 1:3-4