I heard a quote yesterday that I had to write down…
“Whatever you’re afflicted in, you end up having influence over…”
The enemy wants to stop us from walking in our purpose, from reaching our destiny. It would make sense that he would attempt to begin his plans and schemes as early as possible.
(But do you know, God can turn it all around… ❤️✨)
Right now, I am so excited about the things God has been showing me in my dreams. There is such a hunger within me to understand more.
I even get excited about going to sleep, wondering what I’ll dream, wondering what He’ll show me. I get excited to wake up and write everything down –to sit with Him the next morning to talk with Him about it.
I love this quote from John Paul Jackson,
“Dreams are an invitation to know more about Him, by revealing something about you.”
That’s an interesting way to think about it.
Do you know what? Here’s something interesting…
When I was a child, going to sleep was something I dreaded almost more than ANYTHING.
As early as I can remember, I had the worst night terrors. I was constantly going into a panic at bed time, always feeling as though I’d lose my mind. I know I drove my parents crazy with my temper tantrums. I didn’t want to be alone.
I don’t remember many dreams when I was young, other than a few nightmares, and sometimes I had these horrific “paralyzing dreams” where I felt like something was holding me down and I couldn’t move, I couldn’t wake up. It was terrible.
You might say, “well, that’s normal for a child” — well maybe it is “common,” but my situation continued well into adulthood. This “terror of the night” went on almost every night, in some way. Especially if I was alone.
The idea of facing this fear always seemed impossible because I was so afraid of even allowing my mind to consider that “something” is really there terrorizing me. I always tried to push it away by attempting to distract myself. I was even too afraid of God at the time to think of Him being there in the unseen place. Talk about being stuck…
But God…. ❤️
After receiving prayer one day (thanks to my husband), the Lord broke something off of me, and He showed me how to face this terrorizing fear.
The very next day I faced this terrorizing fear head on, but this time I faced it with Jesus, and He delivered me. I don’t think I’ll ever forget the moment I literally felt that fear lift and leave –in that moment I was finally set free of that terrorizing fear.
“You will not fear the terror of the night…” – Psalm 91:5
You see, I was beginning to realize a glimpse of who I was, I was beginning to realize the reality of the power of the Word. I was able to see and believe a truth, that I was not given a spirit of fear, and I began to reach out to Jesus for help, and He helped me to break through in that moment so that I could tell the enemy this new truth that I discovered. “God has not given me a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind.”
It was a couple of years later that the Lord showed me more areas of fear in my life, different kinds, and I went through another round of breakthrough.
Who knew this would be a verse from a passage of scripture that would be such a huge part of my life?
Psalm 91. ?
God did. ☀️
Could it be that the enemy was trying to terrify me so, that anything to do with nighttime, anything to do with sleep, anything to do with dreams, anything to do with my “out of control imagination” — that I’d just want to push it all away and shut it down, “no thanks”… I did that for many years.
And yet now I am finally at the place of discovering and experiencing these beautiful ways that God communicates with us through dreams. These clues into the symbolic language of God… ?
He was there with me all along, on the other side of the fear. His light was like a lighthouse, drawing me to His truth and to His love, I just didn’t know it. It was all just past the lies and the illusions that fear had set up to cripple me, to keep me away from knowing the truth…. and even through I lived in that fear for most of my life, I know that God was with me all along. He was always there waiting for me to turn to Him.
He loved me back to life, and He was doing it the whole time. ?
Thank You, Father. ?
-Heather ?