Misplaced Passion

Last night brought an interesting dream.

I was at a social event in someone’s house. A young woman came up to me and started asking why a certain young man’s family had allowed him to have firearms after he had been found holding a shotgun to his head. I started saying such decisions should depend on his attitude toward guns, because most gun enthusiasts aren’t thinking about violence when they interact with their collections. But I stopped short, because I realized what I was saying was not applicable in a case in which someone had already shown a desire to kill himself.

In any case, his family wasn’t the problem.

The young woman who was talking to me turned into the young man’s wife, and she pushed me back against a wall and kissed me on the mouth very suddenly, with intensity. I realized she was on fire with love for me. I was shocked. Her features seemed swollen as though her love had inflamed her flesh.

Her husband was dead. She was not being unfaithful. Just bold. Like Ruth.

In real life, the man from the dream is alive and has not threatened to kill himself, and I assume his wife and son are just fine. I have never had any designs on the wife, before or after they married. I barely know her. There could never be any type of romance between us. The very thought is beyond absurd. In the dream, she did not represent herself. She didn’t really look like herself.

Her husband is a music leader and former youth pastor. He’s now part of a church which doesn’t promote the Holy Spirit, so whatever his many virtues are, he is probably not in a position to provide her with the knowledge she needs to move ahead with God. Like Travis, he loves performing in front of crowds, and he loves teaching kids. He’s white, but he was very caught up in black culture when I knew him. Maybe he still is. When you get caught up in black culture, you can end up with the same spiritual problems black people have. By seeking approval from black people, you can end up following instead of leading.

I feel like I’m writing about Travis.

After I woke up, I thought about the dream, and I asked God if it meant anything.

The heat and depth of her love had startled me. I thought of the phrase from the Song of Solomon: “I am sick with love.”

Here is the relevant passage, taken from the Complete Jewish Bible:

Like an apple tree among the other trees in the forest
is my darling among the other men.
I love to sit in his shadow;
his fruit is sweet to my taste.
He brings me to the banquet hall;
his banner over me is love.
Sustain me with raisins, refresh me with apples,
for I am sick with love.
[I wish] his left arm [were] under my head,
and his right arm around me.

It made me think about the way husbands and wives are supposed to feel about each other, as well as the way every person should feel about God.

A couple should be completely unified. The Bible says a man and woman are one flesh. They should have deep intimacy and trust. They shouldn’t wonder about each other’s behavior and intentions when they’re apart. Each should put the other above every other person on earth. Their love for each other should be hot and compelling, not lukewarm.

Our relationships with God should also be intense. God should be number one, even above a person’s spouse. We and God should love each other with burning intensity.

As I thought about this, I got a revelation about my unfaithfulness. I’m serious about God, but I wander off and say and do things I should not do. I see now that this is very much like adultery. I have a partner who is always faithful and trustworthy, and he loves me with limitless heat, without reservation. I don’t live up to my end of the bargain.

It’s disturbing to see things this way. I hate adultery and unfaithfulness. I see adultery as something small-minded, trashy people do, like putting used gum on the undersides of restaurant tables or urinating in swimming pools. Adulterers don’t really love their spouses, and they think their sins against them only matter if they’re revealed.

I already knew oneness with God was like marriage, and I knew God compared unfaithfulness to him with adultery and whoring, but it hit home with more strength this morning.

The fact that a firearm suicide was part of the dream made me think about my friend Travis, who died following an accidental shooting.

Travis was not suicidal, but there were self-destructive elements in his life. He never gave up secular music. He never gave up his long list of maladjusted, ungodly, fake friends. He also stayed in Miami even though he knew it was poisoning him.

Travis was a wonderful person, but as someone who loved him pointed out to me, one reason he held onto things that hurt him was that he wanted the admiration of people he knew. Had he left Miami, he would have had to start over somewhere else as a nobody. Many people in South Florida admired him, and he did not want to give that up.

He was not completely honest with himself, and I know he was somewhat different around me than he was with other people. One mistake he made was trying to remain part of the black social justice culture, which is founded on a false victimhood complex. In private, he said this mindset was wrong, but he still used a photo of Colin Kaepernick for a Facebook avatar. I’m not saying the police don’t brutalize people from time to time. It’s the victimhood mindset I’m against.

People who wallow in victimhood are manipulators, and they don’t examine their own contribution to their problems. They don’t grow. They rot.

We all know what happened to Lot’s wife. Our commitment to God has to have depth. We can’t hold onto things from which he wants to free us.

I’m not condemning Travis. I’m just stating facts that matter.

So what does the dream mean? Maybe I’m supposed to take over for Travis. Maybe there is someone he ministered to, and I am going to have to fill his shoes. If so, based on what happened in the dream, that person is extremely thirsty for help.

Maybe it’s more than one person.

I have to hold onto this revelation. I can’t continue mistreating God. It’s vile and unthinkable, but I have done it over and over. If I wouldn’t cheat in an earthly relationship, why would I cheat on God, who allowed himself to be tortured to death for me?

I’m already doing things Travis used to do. There were a couple of young ladies he thought of as marriage prospects, and I ended up texting them a lot. One of them called me unexpectedly the other day, and we had a long conversation. She is disgusted by the people he knew. She lives near Miami, but she has no intention of going to the funeral. Both of us feel that it will be a disgraceful display of false love, from people who did little or nothing for him while he was alive.

She needs someone who isn’t totally useless to tell her things that will help her stay close to God after a major disruption. Travis is actually the third person she’s lost this year, so she really needs something to balance things out.

I thought I wouldn’t hear much from her after Travis died, but I was wrong about that.

While I was typing this, another mutual friend called. He was weighing the pros and cons of going to the funeral. He used to live in Miami, and he hates it. He is disgusted with Trinity Church and Travis’s phony friends. When his son was a baby, he got a big burn on his face in Trinity’s nursery, and the leadership shut him and his wife out when they went to the pastors. Seemed to me they were lawyering up instead of doing the right thing.

My friend isn’t going to the funeral. He made up his mind. He and his family will be here soon for a visit, though.

Rules and doctrine have taken the love out of Christianity. We put these things up like a lattice, and Jesus has to look through it to see us. Now that I think about it, the Song of Solomon agrees: “My darling is like a gazelle or young stag. There he is, standing outside our wall, looking in through the windows, peering in through the lattice.”

We’re supposed to know God personally and have extremely intense feelings for him.

It would be nice if we could go to churches and hear these things. Instead we have to wait for dreams.