The dream was this – I was in a classroom taking a test (a recurring dream scenario for me of late), and there was a noise outside. I went to the door and looked to the right up the highway; there was a towering dark cloud, like a tornado, only emanating from its sides, like leafed branches of a tree, were outcroppings of fire and electricity. I knew this was an ‘act of God” and that if it came my way, it would be my end of life on earth. But it went across the street and hit a one story cinder block building with people inside. I saw the people get tumbled in the twisted wreckage. I started to go out to the disaster to see if I could help, but my teacher told me that if I didn’t finish the test, it would not count and I could not take it over. I told her that people needed help and I was going. I ran to the building and found that the inside had not been as damaged as I thought and no one was killed. I helped several people out, one man saying that he needed to get into the bathroom, but it was blocked. I assumed he wanted to see if someone was trapped inside. I went to look, and woke up.
I laid in bed pondering this vivid dream/adventure, then got up. After going to the bathroom unimpeded, I sat down with a bowl of cereal and checked my email. A friend had sent me a message about a dream she had had about being up in a hot air balloon with the late actor John Ritter. They had kissed, and she was disappointed with it. She wanted to know what I thought about it, having had some experience with my ability to interpret dreams, both mine and those of others. I said it seemed to be that she was looking for “the perfect love,” like in the Jackson Browne song “The Late Show”, ” . . .without dreaming of the perfect love and holding it so far above that if you stumbled onto someone real, you’d never know.” I thought about trying to tell her of my own dream, but decided not to get into it.
Later that day – late morning/early afternoon – I glanced at a TV news program and saw a clip of a cinder block building that had mysteriously blown up in Huntington Station with people inside – it was the building I had dreamed of, destroyed just as the one I had seen. At the time they weren’t sure if there were any fatalities – the disaster had just taken place – but it seemed that all the employees of the Haberstadt Nissan used car dealership had escaped without serious injury. This fact was deemed to be miraculous by witnesses. The explosion had been so loud and powerful, that everyone assumed that all had perished. When I spoke to my girlfriend later that afternoon, I told her about this event and the prescient dream I had had that morning.
The next morning, I checked Newsday.com as I normally do, looking in particular for the details of the explosion. It was believed to be a natural gas explosion, although it seemed there was no gas service directly to the building. The main part of the article was about a man who had been across Jericho Turnpike at an Auto Barn buying transmission fluid because his truck was acting up, an activity which I have become quite familiar with recently. When the building blew up, this guy dropped what he was doing and without hesitation for his own safety, rushed into the ensuing inferno to help those trapped inside to escape. Others followed his lead, and they together saved all the occupants from further injury and, perhaps, certain death, as the building became engulfed in flames soon after all had been removed to a safe distance.
The part of the dream that dealt with the event that happened in the real world later that day was so starkly vivid both visually and in how it had intruded upon the drab and familiar dream of a classroom setting, that I knew I was going to have to decipher its meaning. Most surprising was that I knew that it was God’s direct will that the building be destroyed with people inside. Normally I would think that He was a passive observer of this random event – intervening in His wisdom at some point at the behest of deceased holy relatives or the prayers of living loved ones, or some such thing, knowing beforehand that this was going to happen, but letting it happen anyway — after all, we are not living in perfection here on earth. My explanation and rationalization to myself or anyone who seemed interested in my theological apologetics would have been that God will fill all the voids left by our earthbound tragedies later in His perfection after this life is completed.
But here it was God, or His angel at His bidding, entering this reality to overtly destroy a building, injuring souls and disrupting lives. Was He angry with the Nissan people? Or was there something going on in that particular site that was so egregious as to merit such wrath? Was He providing a way for me to get a cheap truck so I wouldn’t have to keep pouring transmission fluid and other petroleum products into my old Chevy, wondering when the engine would blow up in its own cloud of fire and electricity?
I had seen the event from the point of view of the bystander/hero – the Good Samaritan/amateur-auto-mechanic who had unknowingly rallied the others who together saved the lives of nine people. He rose to the occasion — or was this the occasion of his and the other’s rising . . .?
Take warfare, for example — Many buildings are destroyed, souls lost, lives disrupted. Could God be in all those destructive events, too, as He was in the destruction of the Haberstadt Nissan used car depot? Could He also be just as intimately involved in all human tragedies – fires, floods, earthquakes, storms, diseases, abuse, dysfunctional relationships? We pray for Him to enter these things after the fact – heal the hurts, the sickness, the broken hearts, the empty lives. But He’s already there. He planned it all, allowed it all, did it all.
to be continued ….
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