I slept horribly last night… fighting nightmares and insanity all night long. I can look back on what I dreamed and see why I dreamed it now in the daylight hours, but knowing that now doesn’t change the terror I felt last night.
Dreams are a powerful thing.
Crazy.
Powerful.
Messy things.
I go back and forth wondering if these are night attacks by the enemy of my soul or just my own craziness. Last night I fell into a restless sleep. The night was spent in heart pounding gut wrenching sobbing moments.
It feels like I fought demons all night. I can’t count the times I said the Lord’s Prayer in my sleep last night… I can’t count the times I have said it total in my sleep over the years… it’s my go to prayer in times of distress when I don’t know what to pray. When I get awoke or startled in the middle of the night it is what first pops into my brain and my heart every time.
It’s the prayer, the Scripture, that I use to get awake enough to fight…
‘Our Father who art in heaven,
Hallowed be Thy name.
‘Thy kingdom come.
Thy will be done,
On earth as it is in heaven.
‘Give us this day our daily bread.
‘And forgive us our transgressions,
as we forgive those who transgress against us.
‘Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.
[For Thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever. Amen.’]
Matthew 6:9-13
And yes… I speak King James version in my dreams, always. It’s the version I learned as a child. It is the one that has stuck.
Just as my John 3:16 verse is in the King James… that’s how I learned it as a child… so that’s how I remember it.
The fact is I can remember having these kind of dreams since I was little. I remember once when I was around eleven or twelve I was having a nightmare and I was being choked by dark things I could see… and as I finally got enough breathe I screamed out, “In the name of Jesus get off of me!” Immediately I woke up with a deep breathe and heart pounding. I have never forgotten that dream or how I felt that night.
I have had many nights when I have been awoken by dreams like this and have sat up in the bed and turned on the light and read the Psalms out loud until I felt eased.
You see I don’t watch horror movies because I feel no reason to invite more of this into my mind… I don’t like the feeling of fear… I see no reason to pay for it to be “entertained” by it. The fact that people can come up with the thoughts and visions for these movies, and then enjoy recalling and reliving them enough to write it, cast it, and film it… well to me that’s scary enough. I see no reason to fund their evil minds financially with the money that God has entrusted with me on this earth.
So last night I awoke around 2:30am… and stumbled to the bathroom. Then went to the bed and lifted the sleeping weight of my eight year old and carried her back to her own bed… and then tried to return to sleep.
The next thing I know I am in my mother-in-law’s driveway sitting in my car… and a girl I went to school with jumps in the drivers seat and looks crazy eyed at me and starts the car and takes off. I ask her what she is doing, but she just looks at me crazy and starts driving faster. I begin to think she’s methed out or something, but then I realize nope, this is her face, but it is not her. This is when I begin to say the Lord’s Prayer as the car begins winding down a backwoods mountain road with huge drop-offs. I somehow time a curve and door opening perfect to jump out of the moving car and then watch the car fall off and roll and crash down the drop-off.
I sigh a sigh of relief, then see another vehicle coming and flag them down for help. As I begin to tell what happened I look over and there she/it is coming at me walking up the drop-off completely unharmed… at this point I jolt myself awake enough to be back in my mother-in-law’s driveway.
But then it gets worse… I get called to a school to identify the body of a loved one who has killed them-self. I rush into the room to see them laying in a pool of blood, but when I scream their name, they try to sit up. They are weak, but alive. I remember running to them and seeing the slit wrist and holding their head in my hands and I am sobbing heaping sobs… and out of my mouth I tell them “God is not through with you yet!”
The next thing I know I am in a hospital waiting room and it is filled with all the loved ones I know, the saints of God, who are all their praying for this one that attempted to take their own life…
Then I wake up. Finally.
This is just the Cliff Notes version of my night… how on earth can all this happen in the span of a three hours of sleep?
So Sunday morning I was drained.
And what was I to go and teach… Romans 3:1-18.
So was this an attack of the enemy or just my own crazy thoughts? I don’t know… but either way these nights like this weary this woman.