Blessed Assurance through Visions and Dreams

Answer To Prayer

“More tears are shed over answered prayers than unanswered ones.” Truman Capote, Answered Prayers: The Unfinished Novel

My dreams are vivid and intense and it is in my dreams that I discover things that have not yet come to pass. While at seminary, I was experiencing trouble sleeping and knew I needed a good uninterrupted, restful sleep. I had not slept well in weeks due to the pressures of graduate school, serving a church and having a home life. So, I prayed to God that I might feel my departed mother’s sweet arms around me as I slept. I also surrendered my will to God’s will regarding my precognition dreams. I prayed for clarity, knowledge and wisdom of what to do with the information presented in the frequent dreams. I fell asleep quickly and slept like a baby, feeling my mother’s arms holding me all night long.
I woke the next morning well rested and eager to face the day. I left school in Illinois and began the ride back home to Wisconsin. On the way home, I stopped at a flower shop to buy something to cheer up my dad. He recently moved into a new condo after his second wife lost her battle with cancer.
I was the only customer in the store and the owner was on a phone call. She seemed distressed and agitated. She was a tall woman with long hair that was twisted and pulled high upon her head. Her reading glassed hung on a gold chain around her neck. When she got off the call she came over to help me with my selections. She helped me find just the right vines to form the base of a swag and beautiful white bold flowers to put on the top for a modern display. I would just need to add a ribbon bow. During our conversation, she discovered I was shopping for my father. She learned that my father’s wife had recently died. I finished my selections and we began to check out the sale. She shared that her mother had died about a year before and she still deeply grieved and missed her.
Suddenly she stopped what she was doing and asked me if I ever heard from my mother after she died. This was not a question that usually came up in a conversation with a stranger. I took a deep breath and put on my pastor “hat” and told her I did. I asked her if she believed that part of us lives on, after our life on earth, specifically a soul, spirit or energy. She said she believed an energy lived on. I validated her belief and thought we were done. But we were not.
She related a dream she had a few weeks before. In her dream, her mother was walking on the sidewalk in front of the woman’s home. Along side of the mother was the shopkeeper’s daughter, Sue. Sue was pushing a baby carriage with a newborn baby. The two grandchildren were walking behind the two adults. They were having a leisurely walk on a beautiful sunny afternoon. After telling her dream, the shopkeeper said that her Sue only had two children. The next morning Sue, who lived next door, came over for coffee. The shopkeeper told the dream to her daughter. They had a good laugh at the thought of another child on the way because Sue and her husband had decided on no more children.
The daughter then told a story of her own experience of the night before. The children were in bed and she was heading to her bedroom when she sensed someone else was in the house. It didn’t seem like a dangerous presence, quite the opposite, very friendly. She got the sense of someone peeking into each of the children’s rooms, as if checking on them before going to sleep. It seemed so real, that the daughter even went outside to make sure the windows were securely closed and nobody had broken in.
About two weeks after this dream and visit, Sue went to the doctor and discovered that she was three months pregnant.
We finished our business transaction and then the shopkeeper asked me another question, “why did I tell you all that?” I asked her if she felt her mother was close by. “Yes,” she said. I said, “If you believe that, can you also believe that she might have prompted you to ask me the question, because she knew I would be a safe person to tell your story.” She agreed and seemed calmer than when I first walked into the store.
I, on the other hand, walked out of the store with my heart racing. I walked for fifteen minutes in the mall before calming down enough to get back in the car and drive home. You see, this encounter was an answer to my prayer of the night before. It became very clear that my spiritual path included talking about my dreams publicly to help others be assured there is an eternal life after this earthly one.
This answered prayer is the foremost reason for documenting my spiritual path in the hope it might help others in their spiritual journey.
I am an ordinary person, no big titles, not an author nor any particular person of interest. But the one constant in my life has been the incredible love of a God who is merciful, forgiving, and accepting of all. I feel called to write my story to give voice to all those who have experienced wonderful spiritual events that give them blessed assurance of a loving God and an eternal life with our loved ones.
The intent of this book is to demonstrate how God uses ordinary people in extraordinary ways to communicate the message of love and hope. If credentials are important to you, you may not find this book helpful in your life journey. Yes, I have earned a Master of Divinity from Garrett Evangelical Theological Seminary and I am an ordained Elder in the United Methodist Church. While these are very important in forming who I am as a person of faith, this book will not be an academic effort.
Instead, I will speak from a place of experience. I will speak from my heart for that is where truth resides. I have been very blessed to have walked my journey with many remarkable people, some for a short time and others a lifetime. The impact of events, religion, church, people, family, media, history, internet and multiple other contacts I have had in my life have shaped and informed me just as they have each of us. My hope is that you will relate to my experiences, in such a way that my experiences may become one of the defining moments on your journey.