Skip to main content

Dreaming

Well, I've never had a dream like that before, you know?  Most of mine are the usual kind of thing, with people and places all jumbled together, and it seems perfectly normal that you and Great-Aunt Sarah are riding flying donkeys to Assyria.  Until you wake up.  But this one was... different.

How?  I guess it had an air of... authority, you might say.  Did you ever have a dream where someone was commanding you to do something?  I can't say I have.  But in this one, there was an angel - and I knew right away he was an angel, like you do in dreams.  No, no wings, not that I recall.  But a kind of brightness around him, somehow.

And he told me - just straight out, in plain language - he told me, "Joseph, go ahead and take Mary as your wife.  She's telling the truth.  This child really is from the Holy Spirit, and it will be a boy, and you will call him Jesus."  Exactly what Mary's been saying all along.

And you know - well, I talked to you just yesterday, didn't I?  You know how convinced I was that divorce was the only way to go.  As quietly as possible, of course, but I just couldn't start a marriage knowing I was raising another man's kid.  And as first-born!  It'd play havoc with the inheritance.  Not to mention all the trust issues, and... no, I won't start that again, you've heard it all before.

Well, I woke up this morning perfectly convinced the other way.  The last thing I could do is divorce Mary now.  I know what you're going to say: "Because of a dream?"  But that's what I've been trying to explain.  It all made perfect sense in the dream, and it still makes perfect sense now I'm awake.  This is what I'm being told to do.

No, I know I haven't had any real answers to my questions.  Except - I have, haven't I?  If what Mary and this angel said is true, that changes everything.

Yes, that changes... everything.

Now the birth of Jesus Christ took place in this way. When his mother Mary had been betrothed to Joseph, before they came together she was found to be with child from the Holy Spirit. And her husband Joseph, being a just man and unwilling to put her to shame, resolved to divorce her quietly. But as he considered these things, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream.
Matthew 1:18-20a
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Mr White Watson of Bakewell

Once upon a time, back in 1795 or so, lived a man who was always asking questions.  The kind of questions like, "Why is glass transparent?" or "Why do fruit trees grow better in that place than in this place?" or "What does the earth look like underneath the surface?"  This last question was one that he was particularly interested in, and he went so far as to work out what the rock layers looked like where he lived, and draw little pictures of them.  Now he was a marble sculptor by trade (as well as fossil hunter, mineral seller, and a few other things) so he thought it would be even better to make his little pictures in stone.  That way he could represent the layers using the actual rocks they were composed of.  Over the course of his lifetime he made almost 100 of these tablets, as he called them. Then he died.  And no one else was quite as interested in all those rocks and minerals as he was.  His collection was sold off, bit by bit, and the table...
Post a Comment
Read more

Erewash Valley Trail: Ilkeston

You could spend a lot of time following old canals and railways in the Erewash Valley. This walk included parts of the Erewash Canal, the Nottingham Canal, the Nutbrook Canal, and the Stanton branch line, and I could have continued further along any one of those, if I'd had the time. I started in Kirk Hallam, which is mostly a post-war housing estate with a distinctive outline on the map: the main road to Ilkeston through the middle, and a loop road encircling the village. It looks like the London Underground logo. I parked at the lake at the top of the loop. There was a sculpture commemorating the nearby Stanton Ironworks - the ground remembers the roar of the blast  read the inscription around the base - and the remains of a lock on the Nutbrook Canal. Heading towards Ilkeston, I crossed a former golf course, now a nature reserve called Pewit Coronation Meadows, passed a large sports centre, and was soon in the town centre. There was a general impression of red-brickiness, with l...
Post a Comment
Read more

Austin part 2

Well, I wrote about Bats, Bluebonnets and Breakfast Tacos in a previous post, but that only seemed to cover about half of what we actually did in Austin (were we really there only for a weekend?). And we had several more great photos that Graham has been bugging me to post on my blog, so prepare yourselves for an extravaganza of colour, light and image! Austin is known as a great place for live music, which presumably explains the psychadelic guitars left lying around the streets. Here's Graham with a couple of his dream instruments. We visited the Texas State Capitol, built on a grand scale from tons of pink granite and limestone. The state capit o l, you understand, is located in the state capit a l. Don't get confused. Americans definitely tend towards the domes-and-pillars school of architecture for their governmental buildings. I had a feeling this was true, so did a quick search for corroborating evidence and discovered this great site by a ph...
Post a Comment
Read more