African Dreaming

I had a vivid dream many years ago.

I was standing on the shore of a wide, beautiful river in a ravine. The vegetation was a lush jungle of dark green velvet.

I became aware that I was on the Zimbabwean side of the border, looking towards Zambia. Beside me, Someone was telling me that I was on the edge of two great places. I was both impressed by the vast beauty around me and simultaneously overcome by enormous grief. 

The dream had a profound impact on me, although I am still not entirely sure why. Perhaps it had nothing to do with the great countryside before me at all. Perhaps, although I would not have known it then, it was a foreboding of suffering, probably not my own, but the kind of suffering experienced daily by many. Too many. So many that it hurts with a helpless kind of pain that you feel when you look at something so beautiful that it creates a stabbing, unreacheable ache deep inside you.

I experience it most at Christmas, that intense blend of beauty and pain, happiness and sorrow. The joy of family and faithful friends, goodwill and generosity mingled with the inevitable sadness of the lonely, the poor, the rejected, the sick and dying.

Dreams that linger for years are like close friends or wise mentors. They urge you to remember that which you try to hide under the dusty rugs of daily life - early morning traffic, time crunches and deadlines, money making and money spending, balancing mercy and justice and the systematic chaos of work, duty and responsibility. Then, as the year winds down, everything is slower and less frenetic and you remember: I was standing on the edge of paradise, drinking in the beauty of the African landscape, singing a song of sadness and invisible pain. But I wasn't alone. God, my Strength, lead me in the dream and His Strength will lead me out.

I am not dreaming now. I am awake, watching my little girl sleeping soundly and I am wondering, what dreams fill her mind? How will she hear the Call? Will she shrink back or follow His voice?

But for now, dream on, my little African dream.