In one of the most disturbing dreams I have had, I walked into the prayer room at my ministry and it was dark. That wasn’t altogether unusual because during the worship time on Friday night corporate prayer the lights are often dimmed. In the dream, I saw two men on the platform I did not recognize. They were dressed in black.
When I scanned the prayer room I saw someone had a pillow and was sleeping at the altar. I wasn’t sure exactly what was going on. Is this a prayer lock-in? I wondered. Suddenly I received the bad news that someone had died. In the dream, I did not know who it was. I was so shaken that two people had to help me leave the prayer room and exit the building. Then I woke up.
We need to decipher every dream with God’s wisdom, but an especially disturbing dream or a directional dream demands extra caution. When your emotions are very stirred in a dream — so stirred that you wake up disturbed and have a hard time shaking the feeling — you need to pay extra attention to what the Lord is trying to show you. At the same time, emotions can get in the way of discernment.
Immediately, as I began to the interpret this dream, I wondered if someone in the ministry was going to die. I was so shaken up by the dream that my mind immediately thought of physical death. Before the end of the day, I received a call from someone pivotal in my ministry with bad news: his young son had been diagnosed with cancer.
I wondered if the dream was about the boy. Was the Lord showing me there was a death assignment against the boy? I prayed but did not bear witness to this interpretation.
So I continued to pray. I wondered if the dream was about the boy’s father, the department leader. Would he leave the ministry to care for his son? Are we losing this leader? Was it about a relational death rather than a physical death? I understood that death in a dream doesn’t always mean physical death. It can also mean spiritual death, dying to self, the death of a career, relationship, ministry, or even some sort of judgment or separation.
God’s wisdom always keeps the context in mind. The context of this dream was not personal — it was ministry. As I prayed and began to unravel the dream, it became clear this was not about a physical death or the death of the ministry but about the death of a ministry relationship. Although the leader whose son was battling cancer did slowly move away from the ministry, there was not a death in this relationship. Yet I was convinced the death of a relationship was coming. I just had no idea how soon.
I knew I had to pray because I was so visibly shaken in the dream. The Lord used that dream to prepare me for what was coming — to pray to guard my heart. The pillow in the dream rep- resented resting in faith and in the context of the prayer room it translated to me as resting in faith through prayer. So I prayed for God to help me brace myself for what was about to happen. I refused to become fearful about it. I refused to dread what was coming. I kept the matter in my heart and considered it from time to time, but I did not let it consume me.
It was less than two months before this dream came to pass. While I was putting the ministry in order, I moved some people to different positions and ask others to take a break for a season while we reorganized. One woman was offended and hurt by the reorganization and not only left the ministry but also severed a friendship that was nearly two decades old. This could have been devastating for me on a personal level, but it wasn’t — because God had prepared me through my dream.
What would normally have been a very emotional separation — an overwhelming emotional shock — surprised me but did not stir me at all. God warned me ahead of time and my response was to pray.
If I had ignored or misinterpreted the dream, the personal outcome would have been different. I would have been shocked and emotionally wounded. But I responded correctly to the dream, and God protected me.
There was another aspect to this dream that I could not grasp until after the dream was fulfilled: the two strangers in black. I believed from the beginning these were evil spirits. I pondered, studied, and prayed about these two men in black for weeks and could not get any clear understanding of what spirits these signified. During the transition, two people were offended and left the ministry. A spirit of offense was talking to these people and tempted them to leave when their positions shifted.
I moved through the interpretation of that dream with the Spirit of God, navigating it bit by bit. I tackled each layer, exploring things in prayer. Read the dream and the interpretation again and notice how some of the interpretation process was trial and error.
Finally, parts of the dream were not clear until after the dream manifested. The Lord showed me after the fact what spirits were involved. Was He trying to warn me about the spirit of offense beforehand so I could pray against it? Perhaps. Maybe I missed that part. I still don’t know. But I do know that after the people left the ministry — after this pruning — there was great growth.
What the enemy meant for harm, God used for good (Genesis 50:20).
