A Weird Dream & My Brother Visits

Hey! It’s the week of Christmas friends!! Yay! I hope that wherever you are, however close of family you may or may not have, or friends, or whatever else, I hope that you just feel the deep, warm embracing love of our Savior Jesus in this week when we celebrate his birth. Yes, Christmas is wonderful and fun (and the million things that some, but not all, of us may be doing this week)! But, the best part, is him 🙂 By far!

Well, that being said, one of the gifts that I have coming this week is my brother will be here tomorrow. He’s not my flesh and blood brother, but my spiritual brother, and far closer to me than just about any other man on the planet save my dad. I went to high school with him, we became best friends. We had so many inside jokes. One of my favorite was our obsession with Indiana Jones. Which confession time: if I have had one man crush in my entire tenure on planet earth, it’s Indiana Jones. I mean seriously, Harrison Ford is the one guy that can take a couple punches and still keep going full throttle, he never stops pursuing his treasure, he was also Han Solo (two of the greatest characters ever to grace the screen) and even as a heterosexual male, I can admit it and give him props, he’s a good looking dude (And given the demographics of readers of my blog, I know some of you would have to agree with me on this one. I’m just being real haha! The dude is a stud and a boss!) Anyway…in our AP Physics class, my friend, who did an amazing Nazi German impersonation, would ask the teacher questions in a heavy German accent lol while he was walking through physics mechanics in calculus:

“Ya, Herr Teacher, I have zay question on zay porblem. Ven you take zay second derivative of zay postion function, how do you arrive at this proper answer? Ya, I dü not understand dees, yah?”

I was in the row in front of my friend just dying of laughter, trying not to be seen. You might remember that, you lay your head down on your desk, or very close to it, with some papers and pretend like your writing heavily while really you’re just concealing your laughter. Oh gosh, I loved those times! Fun!

My brother is the man that before I met my wife, while our friends from school were partying we had a special Starbucks (called the West Side Starbucks – because it’s on the west side of town) that we would go to every Friday and Saturday night (and week nights too) and talk about Jesus and life until close at midnight. Our table had two Bibles on it and about 5 or 6 empty Starbucks cups because we would just keep going back for more.

Now he is grown up like me. He has a beautiful family, a wife and two sons. He’s a great husband and father. And a wonderful man of God. They live in Kentucky but his family is here so I get to soak him up for about a week. We’re getting coffee every morning he’s here except Christmas lol. And 7am, Wednesday morning, I’m going to pull into the parking lot of our old hangout, the West Side Starbucks. I’m going to walk up and he’s going to be sitting there, just like all those years ago. I can’t wait. My heart is joyful for this 🙂

Plus, me and one of my other close friends, a good brother in Christ, are hanging out tomorrow night, guys night and grabbing dinner and talking God. And then us plus the wives are hanging out later this week. Basically, props to my wife for letting me get my guys time in this week! 🙂 She’s the best next to Jesus!

So one other thing…I had a dream the other night that was really weird. But, what was maybe weirder was what happened afterward.

In my dream I’m in this huge hall. It’s also at my parent’s house. Which I frequently am at it seems in my dreams (my parent’s house in some form of fashion), which to me screams imagery of the Father’s house. And we’re all watching CNN. The reporters are talking about a massive terrorist attack that occurred on Westminster. The TV is showing aerial shots and it’s just destroyed, devastated. There’s like one building remaining, some obelisk. I then hear this large man say to me, “You don’t wanna know how they died.” The way he said implied maliciousness. Not like he was being protective of my heart, but almost in braggadocious way. It told me that the people had been tortured before death. It was horrible. Then I’m outside and I’m jogging around the fence at my parents house. I see my old neighbor’s mom outside and I hide in between the fences of our neighbors and watch her running her path in front of me. And then I follow. And I wake up.

Odd. Anyway, I’m telling my wife about it in front of our 6 year old daughter. I finish talking and my daughter looks up at me and says, rather plainly and stating facts, “That wasn’t a dream, it was a vision.” My wife looks over at me kinda freaked out. And that’s it.

Weird. No, I’m not saying it’s prophetic. It might be. But I’m not saying that. I think I decided to post it just because I have had a number of things that I heard from God come true. But for the record, I’m not saying God definitely gave me a prophecy here. I thought it was interesting enough to share though.

So, now that I’ve spilled a little about my week. How are you all doing? Any plans for Christmas? Or any prayers for things that are going on in your world?

Blessings to you! Especially and most of all of his Spirit to rest on you and bundle you up in his loving embrace! You are wonderful!

Joel