Words, Pictures and Dreams

So by the end of August 2016, we were praying that God would speak to us through words, pictures and dreams.

You may recall from an earlier blog post, 'Impossible' that our friend, Maurice encouraged us to gather some prophetic data - well, that's basically what it means. God often uses other people to bring words, pictures or dreams to help direct and encourage.

I want to tell you about one picture, one word and one dream...

One picture

Tim and I were both at a Relational Mission Prayer & Equipping event last September. Now, I am always there, because it is part of my job to help organise these events. However, Tim had never been to one before, but was able to make the second day. Prayer & Equipping is a mixture of sung worship, prayer and Bible teaching.

During the sung worship, Tim and I both felt a hand on our shoulder, with someone praying quietly behind us. The guy praying for us then said that he felt God had given him a picture for us and would we mind if he shared it. He said...

'I see a picture of a crossroads. At one end of the crossroads, its really rural - there's grass and trees and at the other end of the crossroads I can see skyscrapers. I feel like God is saying that it's time to take your gifts to the city.

The other thing about the picture is that the way to the city is covered, it isn't clear, but God says not to worry about that because He will make the way clear.'

We were absolutely blown away at the accuracy and clarity of that picture.

One word

Also at the same event, there was a session around the subject of church planting and a call was made to stand up in response for taking responsibility for church planting in the UK. I thought about responding because my heart wanted to but as I looked around and saw a few church leaders stand up, my head took over and I remained seated! And then two people from Aylsham Community Church, Peter and Ann, came over to me, stood me up and proceeding to pray for me about church planting! Ann said...

'I really feel God is saying to you that it's sooner than you think.'

I was encouraged and felt that maybe God was also preparing Ann to hear that I would soon be saying that it was time for us to move to a church planting context. But this word becomes very important in a later blog post.

One dream

We all dream when we're asleep. Sometimes we can remember our dreams when we wake up, sometimes we can't. Sometimes God speaks to us in our dreams and we can recall them vividly. This doesn't often happen to me, but I am learning that this is the way that God speaks to our 10 year old son, Eli. During the Autumn last year, Eli had the same dream, maybe 7 or 8 times over the course of a few weeks. He told me that he was getting really fed up because he kept having this dream, so I asked him to describe it to me and this is what he said...

'We had moved house and I had moved to a new school. I was standing there and all around me were children of different colour skin. I was standing up for them and teaching them how to play Kings.'

At this stage, we had not told our kids about anything, we had not discussed moving to London with them at all. It's also probably worth pointing out that at Eli's current school, it would be made up of around 95% white British (North Norfolk tends not to be so multicultural!) so the picture he saw in his dream would be very different to his current experience. Eli wrote his dream down and I encouraged him to ask God what He wanted Eli to know through the dream.

So, one picture, one word and one dream. We felt this went some way to giving us some 'prophetic data!' Tim drew the picture at the top of this blog post as a way of capturing the crossroads picture.

Next blog post: A lamp unto my feet