Saturday, December 27, 2003
Saturday, December 27, 2003
In the presence of God and of Christ Jesus and of the elect angels, I warn you to
keep these instructions without prejudice, doing nothing on the basis of partiality.
Do not ordain anyone hastily, and do not participate in the sins of others; keep yourself pure.
(1 Timothy 5.21-22
NRSV)
Just a little Christmas humor.
Ron Gullion had a recurring dream about a two-hundred-fifty foot fir tree near his house. He dreamt the tree fell on his house, crumpling the roof and splintering through the living room and front bedroom with a sickening, thunderous roar. Each nightmare would wake him up in a drenching sweat. All his dreams were vivid and frightening. He warned his children to stay away from the old tree. Ron Gullion asked himself, "What do all these dreams mean?"
One day he noticed a twenty-foot dead limb dangling from the tree. A neighbor helped him cut the dead branch off. As Christmas approached the dreams subsided. Ron and Nita, his wife, returned home from Christmas shopping to find their nine-year-old daughter, Alison, had rearranged her bedroom. She had been talking about it for days but her mother asked her to wait until after the holidays. "I just wanted to get it done now," she explained. On Christmas Eve it started to snow as the family made their way to church. "I hunched in the pew with my arms folded tightly," Ron recalls, "thinking about whether I even believed that God was part of my life."
It was near blizzard conditions by the time they reached home. Ron wasn't asleep for very long when he heard a roar. The old fir tree had fallen on their house. Alison across the hall was crying for help. "Daddy, help! I'm stuck," she called out. All Ron could see was branches, insulation, and hunks of ceiling strewn about the trunk. Somewhere in that mess Alison was crying, "Daddy, Daddy." Soon the quiet night was filled with the sounds of rescuers with chain saws frantically sawing parts of the big tree in an effort to free Alison. Hours passed and still they were unable to free the girl. There was the threat of Alison succumbing to hypothermia. Ron began praying to the God whose very existence just hours earlier he had doubted. "Please, God," he prayed, "spare her life." With more equipment the rescuers finally freed his daughter. At the hospital the doctors said she would be all right.
The next day, Christmas Day, Ron and his son kicked through the rubble of their house. In Alison's room he noticed that the bulk of the tree landed right where her bed had been before she had impulsively moved it. He noticed a scar on the tree and realized that it was from the dead branch he had felt such an urgency to remove. That branch might have killed her. Amid the rubble Ron wondered, "Had God been trying to warn me all along about the tree?"
Does God speak through dreams? We've already seen how he spoke to Joseph in a dream, telling him to take Mary as his wife and to name her baby Jesus because he would "save his people from their sins." Joseph believed the angel and he and Mary were married. Later they would to travel to Bethlehem. There in a stable Mary gave birth to a baby boy and Joseph named the baby Jesus as he had been instructed.
Dear God, remind me often to follow your instructions. Amen.
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