Of Dreams, Butterflies, and a God Who Saves in All Seasons
27 May 2020
Amanda is a member of the 2nd Congregation. She shares with us how God brought her friend to salvation using dreams, visions, prayer, scripture and his people.
I. Of Dreams
On 16 February, a dear friend, J, suddenly called me to catch up. I felt prompted to pray for her before we met. We wandered the National Gallery together. J told me that she had a dream the night before. In her dream, she was standing in a church – she felt a deep peace and sensed someone tell her that she could be there every Sunday.
I had been praying for J for three years since I was baptised in 2017, as God had placed a burden in my heart for her. I never thought she would be interested in church or God. After telling me her dream, J confessed that reading many books by atheist thinkers and scientists had ironically led her to believe that there must be a God in the universe.
She challenged me, “But how do you know that this God is Jesus?” I immediately prayed in the Spirit and asked for God to give me the right words. J is a brilliant philosopher who specialised in Plato, and I feared even my best arguments would be picked apart immediately. Instead of any sophisticated rejoinder, these words came into my mind and so I spoke them, “In Him, we live and move and have our being.”
J looked at me in surprise, “I wrote those exact words in my journal this morning when I woke up from the dream.” I told her that it must be God speaking to her because the words suddenly came into my mind when I prayed and she had written them unaware that they were from the Bible. I suggested we open the Bible together to find where these words came from.
We arrived at Acts 17:22-34 where Paul addressed the Athenians (including Greek philosophers like J) and told them that while they had written on their altars “To the unknown God”, God had already made himself known in the person of Jesus. Incredibly, J’s own journal entry that same morning was titled “To a Nameless God”! I told J that as it says in Acts 17:27-28, God has given us intellect and reason “that (we) should seek God and perhaps feel (our) way toward him and find him”. In our search, we are assured, “He is actually not far from each one of us”. I was certain he was not far away from her.
II. Of Butterflies
As we continued our stroll around City Hall, I shared my testimony with J and told her of the transformation that God had done in my heart to turn my heart away from sin, which I could have never overcome by my own strength. I quoted 2 Corinthians 5:17 to her: “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away. Behold the new has come.”
While I was talking to J, I received a Facebook message from someone I did not know personally. This woman told me that while praying for me, she had a vision of a butterfly by a patch of green grass. She believed that God wanted me to know that I had been fed by his word (in my “caterpillar” phase) and kept by his grace (in my “cocoon” phase), God had now transformed me into a butterfly – pollinating flowers to help others bear fruit in him. She interpreted the green grass patch as people in my friendship circle who were “ready for seed sowing and harvest reaping”. She also sent me the exact same verse I had just spoken to J – 2 Corinthians 5:17! I was stunned by this timely message from a stranger and took it as a huge encouragement from God to continue ministering to J and pressing in to pray for J’s salvation every day.
III. Of a Certain and Unfolding Grace
From then on, I met with J almost every week to answer her questions about God and the Bible. On the week that J told me that she was interested in visiting RHC, our services shut down due to COVID-19. Oh no, I thought, rueing the missed opportunity and the uncertainty of when church services would start again. I was not sure what to do, so I prayed.
As I prayed, I had the sense that in this time of COVID-19, God was going to show us that he is mighty to save even outside the familiar context of a real life church service. In this season, he was going to teach us to partner with the Holy Spirit in biblical models of evangelism and discipleship which activate the entire body of Christ, not just the preacher at the pulpit or church staff planning programmes.
I continued to meet J every Sunday, and shared with her what I had learnt from the RHC livestream sermons and from my own walk with God. I was so encouraged that she had started reading the Bible for herself. She read John, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Romans and Proverbs. I began praying for her in her presence too. Still, she had her doubts about Jesus’ outrageous claim that He was the Son of God. How could that be true?
On 5 April, I met up with J for the last time before the circuit breaker measures were put in place. I asked whether I could pray for her. She agreed and turned off the lights and lit a candle, so we could listen to the Psalms in song. After I prayed for her, another friend, D, suddenly came to my mind. I told J that D had been praying for her too, despite only having met her once, as God had placed J on D’s heart. I was prompted to scroll through the many unread messages on my phone and saw D had messaged me.
When I read D’s message, I was amazed. D said she had prayed for me after getting out of the shower, and she had a vision of a lone gold butterfly against a black background. Her text read: “Amid the darkness I felt God saying that as a butterfly your role is to help pollinate and that your role is vital for others to bear fruit.” I felt moved to immediately tell J about both butterfly visions which I had received in the middle of ministering to her. J was amazed too.
J immediately pointed out that D’s vision of a gold butterfly against darkness was similar to the scene before us now, as we were sitting in darkness with a single golden flame from a candle dancing. I told her that I believed the two visions were for her too – God desired her to know him and bear fruit. J said that the words “bear fruit” had jumped out at her from both visions because she had just written in her journal that she felt that she had lived a life of fruitlessness. Perhaps God was telling her there was no fruit apart from him. In that moment, J told me she felt surprisingly compelled by Christ. In faith, I told her the Lord was clearly pursuing her and she would come to know Jesus as her saviour.
IV. Of a God Who Saves in All Seasons
After the circuit-breaker began, I worried that I would not be able to see J to minister to her weekly anymore. She had not replied to my texts in a few days, so I called a friend to pray for J with me over Zoom on the night before Good Friday. We asked God to have mercy on J and to finish the wonderful work of salvation that he had begun in her heart.
Amazingly, on Good Friday, J texted me and said that she had a dream the night before. She dreamt that I was speaking to her about God, but she left to take drugs with her sister, “which felt more sad than satisfying”. She said in her usual poetic way, “These past few days, I have felt the approach of Truth, but I have hesitated at the edges...”
On Easter morning, J attended her first church service via livestream with Simon preaching on Romans 8 and then logged into the webinar with Max Jeganathan on Jesus’ resurrection, where he referenced one of J’s favourite authors – Marilynne Robinson, as well as her favourite philosopher Plato. Just as the webinar concluded, J messaged this to me:
“Where can I go from your Spirit?
Where can I flee from your presence?
If I go up to the heavens, you are there;
if I make my bed in the depths, you are there.
If I rise on the wings of the dawn,
if I settle on the far side of the sea,
even there your hand will guide me,
your right hand will hold me fast.
If I say, “Surely the darkness will hide me
and the light become night around me,”
even the darkness will not be dark to you;
the night will shine like the day,
for darkness is as light to you.
…
How precious to me are your thoughts, God!
How vast is the sum of them!
Were I to count them,
they would outnumber the grains of sand—
when I awake, I am still with you.”
(Psalm 139:7-12 & 17-18)
“Amanda, I think I’ve awoken, and he is still with me. Feel like I can’t reject this any longer.”
Just like that, J stepped into the saving grace of Jesus. That Easter morning, I wept with joy at how good and gracious God is, and marvelled at how he can so quickly awaken hearts to his love even at a time when we are confined to our own homes. It was exactly eight weeks between J having her first dream about God, and her heart coming alive to him. J told me she had been so tired of saving herself, of striving for moral perfection. Now she saw that she was saved and redeemed.
J’s salvation story has shown me that God’s word and the Spirit hold power that extends beyond any walls and church building. He is a God of glory and wonder – through dreams, visions and scripture, he reaches right into our hearts and breathes life into dry bones. He who has overcome death itself, is always calling the spiritually dead to awaken. All this, because his very character is love and mercy.
In the words of J, reflecting on Romans 8, “If there is anything I am convinced of now, it is that God’s love is sovereign and unchanging. There is nothing - absolutely nothing - we can do to add to this love, and nothing - absolutely nothing - we can do to separate ourselves from it. ‘For I am persuaded that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.’ (Romans 8:38)”