Rats are not Pets

My Uncle John had a car dealership.

In 1957, my aunt Mary (not her real name) married John. He lived near Detroit. He owned property used for parking cars. Detroit was booming, so it was not hard to make money selling parking spaces to car-company employees.

John was a very hard worker, and he did well. His business was very simple, so he didn’t have to be a great businessman to make it work.

He saved his money and bought the dealership, which was located in Kentucky, not far from my aunt’s parents. The dealership remained open for several years, and then it closed down. John was not capable of running it.

The dealership was located in Breathitt County, Kentucky, which is a very backward area. John’s employees stole from him. He actually lost money on parts and service. In those days, car dealers made most of their money from parts and service. Parts were disappearing via the back door, and John did not keep an eye on things, so the employees had no reason to stop stealing.

John also had a severe drinking problem. When he was in his seventies, his son said that if he needed to talk to him, he had to call him by 9 a.m., or else he would be too drunk.

John was an extremely carnal person. I doubt he ever had a spiritual thought in his life. Whenever I think of him, the phrase “black-hearted” comes to mind. He was an extreme racist; he even hated Catholics. He stole, and he taught his kids to steal. He threw scary tantrums when he didn’t get his way. I don’t know if he ever hit my aunt, but he always seemed to be on the verge of hitting someone. As far as I know, all he cared about were money, golf, and alcohol.

I can tell you one of the more amazing John stories I heard. His youngest son admired him greatly and tried to be like him. One day John was in the car with his son, and while they were on the road, John saw a ladder beside a house. John said something like, “I see a ladder. No one using the ladder. Must not want it!” He got out and took it. I don’t know how he got a ladder in the car. Maybe it was a pickup. My cousin thought what he did was hilarious. He also did things like stealing sauce bottles from Arby’s instead of asking for packets.

He really disliked me. I was my grandfather’s second-oldest grandson, and the oldest was his son. My mother always thought he hated me because I was the favorite. My grandfather had money, so it would make sense that his sons-in-law would vie for his approval.

As the business failed, my grandfather loaned money to John to keep it alive. He did this more than once. Eventually, he contacted his other children and asked them what he should do. He pointed out that the money was coming from their inheritance.

John used to sweep the dealership and keep it clean, but he didn’t know how to run it, and because of his drinking, he probably couldn’t have done it anyway. GM’s accounting division, GMAC, had a system for dealers to use, but John didn’t use it. He started selling cars cheap to raise cash. He would take a new car to an auction, sell it for a few dollars over cost, and think he had made money.

Eventually, my grandfather came to own the dealership. John and Mary divorced, and John went on to distinguish himself as a divorced dad by teaching his son to curse his mother and ridicule the trailer she and the boys lived in. He was really something.

Last night I dreamed I owned his dealership.

I was in the dealership with a bunch of friends from college. They were young. I felt young. I don’t know how I looked. They were my college friends, but they weren’t real people I actually knew when I was in college. For some reason, they had come to help me clean the dealership up.

There were no cars there. The place was empty. It was going to be repurposed, but I don’t know what the plan was.

There were rats everywhere, or at least there had been. There was rat excrement everywhere.

I saw a steel cabinet on the wall, like an electrical panel cabinet. There were shelves inside it. There were shelves on the floor under it. On top of the shelves, there were a bunch of tight springs maybe 30 inches long. They had been disconnected from something. I kicked at the shelves to see if any rats were still there, and I saw a dark shape scurry away down by the baseboard.

I found a push broom and opened one of the garage-style doors to sweep poop out. One of the girls took the broom, so I had to go find another one.

There was an apple tree growing into the garage through a door. The leaves were shiny and dark. They were very full of life. There was a pile of old brown leaves on the floor. There were no apples because it was too late in the year, but the smell of dried apples was everywhere, as though there were old apples under the leaves.

There was a piece of agricultural equipment out front. It was a long piece of steel with some sort of disks on it. The disks were some kind of reinforced plastic, and they were just about gone. A guy picked it up and asked me if he should throw it out, and I told him to leave it until I figured out what it was. Maybe it was valuable.

I went to John’s office, which was now my office. An older man with a southern accent was going through things, trying to put them in order. He reminded me of many southerners I’ve known. Back in the Sixties, it seemed like the world was full of southern men in their forties and fifties who were building America. They were pilots and engineers. They were military people. They got things done. They were people you could rely on.

Seems like they were always tall, thin white guys with angular features. They spoke with exactly the kind of accent you would expect to hear when a pilot speaks reassuring words over a jet’s intercom.

The office was just a tiny room on the side of the garage. It should have been a closet. The closet-sized office had its own closet, with a little sink where people could wash their hands. I went in and used it. The whole building was filthy. I was worried about getting a disease from the rat dung.

I felt indebted to the young people who were helping me. I had an urge to pull a fifty out of my pocket, put it down on the desk, and say, “BEER,” but I didn’t.

Does the dream mean anything?

In dreams, buildings are people or their offices. I dreamed about Donald Trump and a vacant building, and the building was his new presidency. Maybe the building represented my functions in this life.

Car dealerships are extremely filthy places. They run on fraud and theft. Maybe this is how God sees the person I was.

What are springs? An iniquity is an inner spring. A word the Bible translates as “iniquity” really means “crookedness.” When you take a crooked stick and straighten it, it becomes crooked again when you stop exerting effort. It’s a type of spring. The discarded springs in the dreams may have been the inner springs that used to push me to be a sinful person.

Rats are demons. Rats don’t show up on their own. We leave doors open. We leave garbage in cans. We drop food and don’t pick it up. We choose not to put traps out. We get angry at our demons, and we think we’re their victims, but we’re really just angry at our partners. The Bible says we’re supposed to be partners with God.

Rat dung is what demons spread inside us. They make us unclean. They make us ill. They make us disgusting for righteous beings, like the Holy Spirit, to inhabit.

I’m not sure who the older man was. Maybe he was the Holy Spirit, come with authority to rearrange and cleanse things. I believe the younger people were Christian friends I’m going to make.

Psalm 23 says, “You make me to lie down in green pastures.” In the Bible, green grass symbolizes the wicked. They grow for a season and then wither or are cut down. They are temporary. Most of the people you know now will disappear from your life forever when they die. Often, wicked people are allowed to waste their lives building up wealth so God’s children can have it when they lose it.

The verse says we lie down in green pastures. It doesn’t say we plant them or even that we have to stand and cut the grass for ourselves. This is a picture of inheritance. The Bible calls us heirs too many times to count. We’re not supposed to work hard at carnal tasks. That’s for the damned. We’re supposed to receive good things they’ve worked to build. Eventually, we will receive the whole earth.

I received a big building in the dream, ready to be cleaned up and made useful. Maybe it shows how Spirit-led Christians are taking ministries over from prosperity preachers and feel-good preachers who filled their churches with rats and dung. I don’t mean we’ll get the churches. We don’t need those. God is operating outside of churches now, through people without titles.

I used to be a member of Trinity Church in Miami, and their building was full of rodent dung. They had a big room beside the kitchen, and it had a cabinet along a wall. The cabinet was waist-high, and the drawers were full of thousands of pieces of unused flatware. Trinity always took anything anyone offered, so I guess someone gave them flatware.

They never cleaned the room. The drawers were packed with mouse dung.

For a while, I made pizza for Trinity, to be sold in their cafe. I had to set a table up in the storage room. Before I got to work, I insisted on getting rid of the dung. I got some kids, and we emptied all the drawers and cleaned everything with bleach. The pastors knew about the filth, and they should have been aware that it was very dangerous, but they didn’t care. As long as no one could see it, they were fine with it. If I hadn’t taken a stand, people would have made pizzas on a counter just above drawers full of moldering excrement.

Trinity had a kitchen volunteer named Kervin. He had a young son who kept getting sick. He kept getting high fevers. No one knew why. He used to play in the storage room. I told people the mouse excrement might be his problem. No one cared.

We were expected to pray for this kid, but anyone who talked about cleaning up the excrement was being “negative.”

I hope he’s okay.

I would be astounded to learn that the drawers were not full of dung right now. The Wilkersons and their cronies never learn. Their pride makes them stupid.

When my sister succumbed fully to addiction and hate, her house filled up with dung. She had a dog she never housetrained, and she didn’t mop after him. Her floors were coated with a varnish of urine and feces which accumulated, undisturbed, over a period of years. Rats came in, and she left things like big bags of beans in her pantry. Eventually, rat exrement was everywhere, and when you walked into the house in the daytime, I could hear panicked rats running around in the pantry, looking for places to hide. When I opened the door, I saw opened packages gnawed by rats. Meanwhile, my sister lived in the master bedroom, on a tiny bare place on a filthy mattress with no sheets. The rest of the house belonged to bugs and rodents.

Pests were given to us for a reason. They teach us what we become when we let demons live in us. They show us why repentance and casting out demons are necessary. But many of our big churches teach us to feed the demons instead. They say demons don’t exist. They give people the idea they can sin all they want, because they have Eternal Security. They say fornication is not a problem, as long as you’re a nice person. They say homosexuality is part of God’s plan. They don’t warn people about idolatry. They even teach meditation and yoga.

When a prostitute loses her looks, she has to come up with a new bait, and she has to lower her price.

What is it the new hipster churches DO warn about? “Judgment.” That’s the only sin left, as far as they’re concerned. Anyone who tells you the ship is sinking is a divider and a pharisee.

I suppose the Great Whore of Babylon in the Revelation must be the modern church. The prophet Hosea was told to marry a whore, and she kept running off with other men. She was still his wife, but this is how she behaved. The whore of the Revelation must be a group of people who are supposed to belong to God. If she were not supposed to belong to God, she would be something else, like an armed soldier on a horse. A whore is someone who betrays and sells out.

The modern church is filling itself up with idolatry. Pastors teach mindfulness, which comes from Hinduism. They teach yoga. They teach positive thinking divorced from scripture. They teach self-worship. There is a bride of Christ, and there is the great whore which persecutes God’s children.

People say Kenneth Copeland, possibly the most poisonous prosperity preacher, is trying to start a new religion combining Catholicism, Islam, and charismatic Christianity. If that’s true, it makes perfect sense. The Antichrist will be a religious leader, and he will be someone who comes from Christianity. John said the antichrists of his time “went out from us but were not of us.”

The prefix “anti” doesn’t just mean “against.” It means “instead of.” The Antichrist will try to give us a different way. The world is looking for a form of Christianity that incorporates homosexuality and ends the tension between Bible-believers and those who endorse sexual sin. The Antichrist will probably lure people by “solving” that problem.

I saw Mark Hemans say something very interesting. He was looking at a stained glass window in a cathedral. It showed two men in a bed. He said the Holy Spirit told him this would be the world’s new religion.

I hope God is cleaning me out. I hope he is preparing me to do useful things. I don’t want to be a disgusting environment for the Holy Spirit any more.