God Thoughts
God Thoughts
August 1, 2017
“You don’t have to see the whole staircase, just the first step.”
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
I dream about staircases a lot. I’m pretty sure they’re anxiety dreams. Some people dream about their teeth falling out; I dream of stairs.
Weird stairs, as things in dreams are wont to be. Always high up, and I’m always in a place where I have to go up or down, or suffer some horrible consequence, and then the steps are inverted, twisted, backwards, missing, maybe even a combination of all those. Always scary; I’m terrified of heights. Once I went with my brother to visit our office when it was under construction. It was in an industrial building, up on a mezzanine, 17 steps above the ground floor. Just 17 steps, no walls on either side, no railings. I knew I shouldn’t go up, but my brother wanted me to see the view out of what would be my office, so I did. There was no railing on the edge of the mezzanine floor either. When it came time to leave, I got about six feet away from the edge of the mezzanine and the top of the stairs and I got physically sick to my stomach. Faint, dizzy. My brother, teasing, said, “for Pete’s sake, am I going to have to get the fork lift to get you down?”
I actually got onto my hands and knees and crawled over to the stairs. My nephew, who was working, exclaimed “Aunt Linda!” in a horrified voice. I bumped down more than half the staircase on my butt, until I got close enough to the ground that I was comfortable standing up.
I had one of my staircase dreams recently. I was running up and up, and as I was going, each step would magically appear just in time for my foot to land on it. I wasn’t giving it a second thought until something, I don’t know what, distracted me, and I stopped. And there I was, in my dream, perched on the top step of a staircase opening onto nothing. No walls, no railings. I was paralyzed. I kept thinking, “go on, go on, the step will be there; it’s been there all the way so far”, but I absolutely could not bring myself to put my foot down, just in case it wouldn’t be there, and I would fall. Remember the Indiana Jones movie about the Holy Grail, when he has to step out onto the invisible bridge to get to the cave where the Grail is?
In my dream it seemed like I stood there for hours. And then I woke up. I usually have a hard time remembering dreams, generally just snippets of them, but that one stayed vivid all that day, that feeling of total fear and paralysis in taking that next step. And the more I thought about it the more I realized that God was trying to tell me something about my faith, or lack thereof.
I’m the kind of person who has to know “how” everything is going to work. If I can’t see a logical, reasonable answer to a problem, then I’m sure a solution can never be achieved. I put my problems and obstacles in God’s hands, and then I badger Him mercilessly. “How, God? How are You going to do it? It doesn’t make sense to me. How will it ever work out? How? How?” I want to see the whole staircase before I believe.
I get two answers from God. The first is the same way He answered Job when Job lamented about his troubles. “Where were you when I made the earth?” The second is my favorite, and I wish I would quit forgetting it so easily. I say, “How, God? How?” And He says to me, “Be still, and know that I am God.”