Fall Cleaning

What a night I had last night.

As noted in a previous entry, I cooked for a friend of my dad’s. This man has had a run of misfortune running back to the Eighties. I don’t want to get into it. You wouldn’t believe it. Now he’s having all sorts of physical problems. When he arrived, he was walking with two canes. He could barely get around.

I was going to make stuffed pork chops, but prime beef caught my eye while I was shopping, so I got a four-rib roast! Ten pounds of it. Overkill, I suppose. I cooked it to an internal temperature of 125º (115º next time) after rubbing it with garlic and butter and salt, and it was sublime. I also made baked potatoes and apple pie. On the side, we had garlic butter, chives, sour cream, and horseradish sauce (whipped cream, prepared horseradish, salt, pepper). My dad took out a bottle of 1990 Pommard he had been saving, and his friend is a wine nut, and they both raved over it.

The pie seemed a little dryer than it should have been. I think the crust was a little too thick, and I didn’t brush a wash on it, which would have made seem moister. Instead of a nasty egg wash, I use the liquid from the filling, and I sprinkle the pie afterward with turbinado sugar. The liquid makes it stick.

Inevitably, religion entered the conversation. My sister and I mentioned Trinity Church, and we got a few plugs in, and he said he would be happy to go with us! I never expected that. Many people respond to overwhelming suffering by hating or denying God, and it’s hard to think of anyone who has suffered more than this man. But he’s still open. So we’re going to try to get him to go next week. That would be phenomenal. Satan lets most Americans have fairly good lives, probably because they don’t threaten him much. Other people suffer misfortune after misfortune, even though their sins are not remarkable at all. Some of us are more hated than others. That’s just how it is. When you know a person like that, you feel empathy and frustration because you know what they need, and you know it may be hard to lead them to it. When you get a taker, it’s extremely gratifying.

I can’t believe it. Suddenly, I find myself able to reach people. I was never able to do that in the past. My take on this is that God has decided I’m no longer such a tremendous idiot that I should not be allowed to participate in his work.

I had a funny dream last night. I’m not sure what the difference between a dream and a vision is. I would tend to call the first part of last night’s experience a vision, because I was fully lucid and all my senses were operating, and I felt as though I were in the physical world, not a dream universe. My dreams tend to be somewhat less intense.

Whatever it was, it went like this. I was trying to sleep, and I started hearing noises in the room, as though something was there with me, deliberately waking me up and trying to scare me. Then I found myself wrestling and being thrown around by something invisible. I overcame it and found myself able to fly, and I was able to see things that did not exist in the physical realm. Some I saw clearly. Others were appeared as ripples and disturbances in the world around me. I chased them around and gathered them out of the air. Their strength was negligible compared to mine; I folded them up in my hands like limp cloths. Then up near the ceiling, all around the room, I found wispy, semi-visible beings resembling cobwebs, and I grabbed them, too. Then I saw musty, smelly objects up in one corner, like some kind of egg sacs that had been left there to hatch. I pulled them down and flew out of the room to the back door, and I went out and expelled the whole mess. Then I started to fly above the neighborhood, and when I looked down, I realized I couldn’t see all the houses. At that point, I knew I wasn’t in the real world. I couldn’t see the houses because I can’t imagine the whole neighborhood from above. It’s not in my memory.

After that, the house became the house I grew up in, fifteen miles north of here. I experienced nothing but misery and failure in that house. The same goes for my family. For some reason, it was now full of people from my church. Apparently, they had obtained it from whoever owned it. They were remaking it. And they were having a huge sleepover. The place had been divided up into temporary compartments, using curtains, and there were portable beds set up all over the place. My pastor’s son and his wife took the master bedroom. They had remade it for themselves. I think they were in charge.

I found the hole in the wall in the upstairs hall, from the shot I accidentally fired when I was a kid. I was looking at my mother’s .38, and it went off. My solution was to cut a tiny piece of wallpaper from an inconspicuous area and glue it over the hole. It worked. My parents never found it. In the dream, a new owner had painted over the wallpaper, including the patch. The new paint was patterned like wallpaper. It looked a little like a Mondrian painting. It was a product intended to cover and replace wallpaper, at a lower cost. But you can’t make paint that makes multicolored geometric patterns when you slop it on with a brush or sprayer or roller. Very strange.

The yard was full of new construction. There were areas that had walls and furnishings but no roofs. These areas were full of people, and it was as if they were preparing for an outdoor celebration.

I found a bed beside a window. I wanted to be able to see the landscape pass by. The house had become a train, and we were going to travel around the south.

At this point, someone from the church introduced me to a woman. It seemed like they were trying to fix us up. I didn’t catch her name. It sounded something like “Mickey-O.”

Then my neighbor’s dog woke me up.

It was a wonderful dream. Or vision. Or whatever. It was about renewal and victory.

Maybe the houses symbolize me. In the Bible, houses are people. Maybe the things I fought and expelled are the supernatural forces that have been hindering me all my life, ruining the things I try to build. Maybe the people from the church are the angels, Christians I’m getting to know, and the Holy Spirit, filling the space the evil things used to occupy and undoing their work. Maybe the eggs represent bad things I sowed into my future, which are now cancelled because of my faith and obedience.

A journey means hope. No one ever takes a trip unless he or she has a hope of some sort.

When I went to bed, I felt as though something was being pushed out of me. I felt as though it was resisting desperately, like someone being shoved out of an airplane. Sometimes it was mostly out, and sometimes it was mostly in. I wonder if that’s related to the dream. I know this: I feel great today.

Time to dress for church.