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Saturday morning. I should have been able to sleep in, but Rachel’s alarm had been left on and it went off at 6:30 a.m. I jumped out of bed to get it, but she switched it off before I could get to my door. I crawled back into bed, bugged that a good sleep had been cut short. Then I reminded myself that God always has His reasons.
What was that dream I had just been having? Oooo . . . creepy.
We had moved into a different house. Financial difficulty had finally made it easier to move into a smaller, run-down house, rather than to stay in our nice house and fight the pressure. The main floor didn’t look too bad; it’d just had a fresh coat of paint, so cosmetically there was a good face on it.
In the dream, it was the day of the high school’s Big Band Dinner Dance, just as it was in real life. My awareness of the time-frame was God’s way of saying to me, “This is your life, right now.” I was amazed to find us already moved into this new place: I didn’t even remember making the move. Obviously it had happened fast and easily—so fast, in fact, that I hadn’t even seen the basement yet. I decided to go down and have a look.
The basement presented a much different picture from the main floor. There had been no effort made here to cover up the true state of the house. It was dirty, and the concrete floor was cracked and uneven. I saw an old cellar door, stuck slightly ajar. Just outside the door was a poor little cat. It was tied with a heavy cord, one end attached to the wall and the other end tied tightly around its middle, tight enough that the cat could not squirm out of it. (Knowing cats, that’s pretty tight!) However, the cat did not seem to be in much distress; it was used to the discomfort by now. It had plainly been kept there a long time.
Now I saw why the cats had been kept captive there: they killed and ate the overflow. The cat inside the door got most of them, but now and then a creature would slip out the ill-fitting door, and then the other cat would catch it.
Lord, what does this mean? Is this a spiritual dream, or just random ramblings of my mind? Are You trying to speak to me? The thoughts began to come:
Reptiles, to me, always represent the powers of darkness. Jesus spoke all in one breath of “serpents and scorpions and . . . all the power of the enemy” (Luke 10:19). This was clearly a picture of spiritual oppression. Evil spirits. There were evidently some cracks in our foundation where these repulsive beings were getting in; now they were proliferating right inside our home.
This brought to mind the heaviness that Greg and I experience over some of the choices we have found our teenage children making. How many times have I said that I had a “knot in my gut” as I have tried to pray against the things I see happening! Just like those poor little cats, both tied with a knot around the belly, we are trying to destroy (through prayer) the manifestations that are spilling out of that bucket. The bucket, perhaps, represents the lives of our children. Greg would be the cat outside the door; he’s away from home a lot, but he deals with the things that get away on me, the things I can’t handle on my own.
The worst part of this scenario is that these two cats are spending all their efforts in cleaning up the over-flow, dealing with the final symptoms, their guts in a knot, and no freedom or perspective to deal with the real source of the problem. The breach in the foundation needs to be repaired.
This ugly house is not the place that God chose for us to live; we find ourselves living in this situation because of pressures we could no longer resist. Similarly, in real life, spiritually, we find that we have moved from where God intended us to live. We have succumbed to worldly pressures that have slowly invaded, as our children have persistently tuned to certain radio stations and brought certain magazines and videos into the home. They are very typical kids, and the media they gravitate to reflect worldly values. These media portray attitudes that run to the irreverent, reckless, and rebellious, or that are preoccupied with superficial beauty and ungodly attitudes toward relationships and sex.
Our foundation has been breached as we’ve slowly given in to the insidious and continual pressure of these things. Now there are some strongholds of certain attitudes in our children, spiritually unhealthy kinds of thinking that are reproducing and multiplying right in this house.
The house in my dream has freshly painted walls on the main floor—a good enough front to present to the rest of the world. You’d never guess that underneath, down in the basement, there are some potentially serious issues that need to be addressed.
As I think about all of this, it seems like a weight settles on me, stifling me. I find myself resisting the interpretation of the dream as it comes, hoping that this isn’t really what God is telling me, because it’s too hard to deal with—the thought of trying to change things now. If over the years we have found ourselves gradually less able to uphold as high a standard of godliness as we would have liked—as our children have grown older and been more and more exposed to the ways of the world—how impossible to turn the tide now! How unreasonable to suddenly try to clamp down on our kids and forcibly prevent them from hearing and seeing and doing certain things! They are at an age where they rightfully are making more and more of their own decisions about their lives, just as God intended. They are finding out who they are, who God created them to be, and their journey may take them, at times, in a rather roundabout way. If we were to try to drastically increase control now, we would probably incite full-fledged rebellion. “Provoke not your children to wrath,” is a solemn caution to parents.1
Even as I feel this heaviness, though, this dread of trying to deal with the problems, I sense God reassuring me: His way of addressing these issues is not the way of coercion and bondage. Not between Him and us; not between us and our children. He will not put on us a weight too grievous to be borne.2 All the ways of the Lord are mercy and truth.3 “Come now, and let us reason together,” He says.4
Just as He wants to sit and talk with us, He wants to teach us how to sit and discourse and truly communicate with our children. We can continue to nurture and admonish them in the Lord,5 gently correcting and teaching, every day. Trying to restrict our children’s choices at this point would be like trying to remove all of the reptiles. It’s a short-sighted plan. We need, rather, to repair the foundation.
The truth of God is our sure foundation. Where the truth has been breached, He will show us how to apply more truth as needed, carrying it with us like a bucket of mortar in one hand and a trowel in the other: here a little, there a little.
Even as God promises to extend mercy and truth to us, He will show us how to extend mercy and truth to our children: guidance based not on fear but on faith—faith in God’s ability to save them to the uttermost.6
Let them repair the breaches of the house, wheresoever any breach shall be found (II Kings 12:5b).
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