I had a wonderful dream this morning that I believe was from God and I want to share it with you. But first, I need to give you a tad of background.

As you may already know, God has been working some deep things in me since Rolland and Heidi Baker came to my church in early April, seven weeks ago. They encouraged us to pray two prayers, which I sincerely prayed. The first was "Lord break my heart and give me Your compassion." And the second was "Lord, please do whatever it takes to make me completely dependent on you." God has been answering those prayers. And it is not surprising that, as a result, these past two months have been difficult months for me.

Yesterday during the day, I had a neat encounter with God. I was driving past an intersection where, several years ago, the Holy Spirit had met me and invited me into a covenant with Him. That covenant went something like this: His part was to transform me to make me into someone who He enjoyed living in and my part was to do my best to cooperate with Him in the process. That intersection has become a special place to me and I often renew that covenant with Him (remind myself of it and recommit to it) when I drive past that intersection.

I have been feeling in a bit of a desert lately. I've had some experiences with God these past seven weeks, even some open visions that might sound "amazing." But overall, I have not felt that sense of intimacy and that awareness of His presence that I am used to and love so much. Because of that, it has been harder to be spiritually minded. These past seven weeks it has been so easy to get caught up in the details of day to day life and not think about God for multiple hours at a time -- which is unusual for me. I don't like it.

Anyhow, this "desert season" has left me feeling sort of "dirty," like I must be repulsive to God because I seem to be in such a carnal place. So, as my car approached the covenant intersection, I wondered if the Holy Spirit was frustrated or disgusted with me. I still sincerely desired to be someone He would enjoy indwelling (or living inside) and I renewed my commitment to do my best to cooperate with Him in the process. (I also told Him that I might need a little extra help right now, because my "will power" did not seem to be very strong.) I was stopped because the light was red. There were so many cars in front of me, very heavy traffic, and I did not expect to make it through the light once it turned green. That was fine with me, as it would give me a little extra time to pray at my covenant intersection.

As the light turned green and the long row of cars first began to move forward, I heard this. "Teresa, I am not mad at you and I accept you and your covenant with Me. In fact, I am going to keep this light green until you get through the intersection as a sign to you that I love you very much and I am quite pleased with you."

Was that really God's voice or was it my imagination? Would God really tell me that He was pleased with me in the midst of my desert experience when I felt so unspiritual? It was easy to test. There was no way, in the natural, that I'd make it through that light if God did not intervene. Yet I drove up to the light and it was really bright green. It did not even turn yellow as I made my way through the intersection. I was amazed and I was blessed. God had really told me that He was pleased with me.

You would think that type of experience would keep me spiritually minded for the rest of the day. But shortly after that, day to day life demanded and consumed my attention and when things "quieted down" I found myself working on the computer then watching a hockey game on TV instead of praying and talking to God. Then Ed got home from work and wanted me to watch a few TV shows with him. So I ended up with a pleasant but carnal evening. Even after God spoke such an encouraging thing to me, I did not spend much time with Him.

When I went to bed, I reviewed the events of the day, and was once again frustrated with my behavior. It was like God had gone out of His way to meet me and I practically ignored Him. I apologized and this intensity rose up within me, this desire to be closer to Him and back into that place of intimacy. I spent a little while, maybe 20 minutes or so in prayer and God seemed "near." During that time, I told Him how much I wanted to be close to Him, live more in His presence, etc. As long as I was sharing my "wish list" with God, I also threw in that I wanted to raise the dead someday.

After a while, I drifted off to sleep. I had a dream that I believe was from God.

In the dream, I was with a bunch of police at some sort of excavation site. Apparently a body was buried there (not a cemetery) and the police had a court order to dig it up. The mother was there before the digging began and she was very upset that we were going to exhume her daughter's body. She wanted her daughter to rest in peace, if in fact the body turned out to be her daughter. There was some uncertainty as to whether or not there was a body there or whether or not it was really her daughter. She handed me a vile of holy water and asked that if they did find and disturb a grave, that I sprinkle the holy water on the casket. (I think that the police had me there as a minister in case the corpse was found, but that part of the dream is unclear.)

The scene changed, a bit like a "fast-forward." The mother was no longer there, and the digging had begun. They had used a tractor at first because the ground was very hard. Then they switched to shovels. That was the "scene" my dream "fast-forwarded" to.

It did not take them long to find a wooden crate that was shaped more or less like a coffin. They pulled it out of the ground and laid it near the digging. They were not going to open it there, but to ship it to the police lab. However, I felt compelled to mention that the mother, a Catholic, would feel much better if they allowed me to sprinkle the holy water on the casket before they moved it. The lead detective said that would be OK. I expected to sprinkle the water on a closed casket, but the detective had them open the casket for me to sprinkle the water on the body.

When they opened the casket, I was shocked by the contents. There was a young woman in her late teens or very early 20s. She had long blond hair and she was very beautiful. There were visible wounds or no marks on her body. The startling part was that the body had not appeared to decompose at all. In the dream I knew she'd been in the unmarked grave for at least two weeks. The body had not been "prepared for burial" by a mortuary -- so it should have decomposed by now.

Suddenly there was a loud wail, a female's shriek, in the distance. I turned my head and saw the mother at the police barrier... sobbing as she saw her dead daughter's body. However, she was not allowed to approach the scene. A few others approached the crate-coffin and looked inside. I am not sure if they saw what I saw or if they saw something else.

I approached the coffin and I sort of tensed up and prepared myself to be grossed out. But there was nothing gross about it. The young lady looked very natural and looked more like she was sleeping than like she was dead. I glanced down at the vile, to see how to open it so I could sprinkle the holy water on the body. Everyone gasped, causing me to look at the body. It was sitting up. I remembered seeing in a movie how corpses sometimes move due to muscle atrophy, etc, and I figured that was what happened.

Then I looked at her and realized she was moving her arms a little, and that she had opened her eyes. She was alive! At first I wanted to jump back. I think I watched too many horror movies in my before-Christ days where the corpse comes to live and tries to kill you. All these scary thoughts flashed quickly before my mind and just as quickly I realized that she was not evil and that she was not any sort of danger to me. I don't know how I realized it -- I just knew deep within my being.

One of the police men, acting from fright, tried to hit her in the head, but I stopped him. Then I bent over her, with my face very near to hers. She looked at me and said, in a very child-like and innocent voice, "Where am I? What am I doing here." She did not appear to know that she had been dead and buried.

I asked her to get out of the crate, and she tried to do what I asked. But she did not have control over most of her body. It was as if she was paralyzed. Then I remembered that the muscles on dead people quickly stiffen. (I believe it is called rigamortus). I realized that since she had just come back to life, her muscles had not loosened up yet. For an instant I was afraid to touch her, but that passed quickly. I began to rub her neck and shoulders and I could feel the stiff muscles relaxing under my touch.

Then I began to work with her fingers and her hand, massaging them and slowly unbending them and then bending them again. Back and forth. In the dream I was reminded of a real-life incident. It was a healing of a paralyzed lady that God did in Brazil, when I was praying as a part of Randy Clark's ministry team. In that real-life experience, I prayed for and worked with each joint, one at a time until she had her motion back. That healing had taken hours, and it had been one joint at a time. In the dream, I remembered that real healing experience I had in Brazil.

So I worked with her a little at a time, massaging muscles and bending and then straightening joints. Soon she had her motion back in her upper body, her arms -- everything was working correctly except her legs. The girl was not at all frightened and she was happy to cooperate with me in the process. I showed her a few stretches and she did them with me. I asked her if it felt good to stretch her ribs and she said, "Oh Yes!"

Then she began to add a few stretches of her own. I knew it was time to start working on her legs, and that total mobility would come back to them as well. She would be restored to full functionality and able to resume her life that was prematurely cut off.

That was when I woke up. When I awoke, I had a strong sense of God's nearness surrounding me. Suddenly I had a series of revelations. In the dream, a lady had been raised from the dead. God did all the work, all I did was help her regain mobility after she was already raised. I had always assumed that raising the dead involved hours and hours of toil, of praying and beseeching God. The stories I'd heard about the dead being raised in Africa all involved people praying and warring for the person to be resurrected for hours and hours and hours. Somehow I had interpreted these reports as the person raising the dead person ... when it is really God who does the work.

I also realized that in the dream, I had been seeing one thing while the others (the police, detectives, etc) were seeing something else. I had been seeing in the spirit in the dream, seeing what God wanted to do. I saw the young lady as alive before they did because they only saw in the natural and I saw in the spirit. God showed me what He was doing and then allowed me to participate in it with Him. My part was very minor, He was the One who did almost everything. I just sort of went along with what I saw and tried to minister to the young woman as God began healing and restoring her. I was almost clueless to what God was doing, just going along with the little part that I did perceive and understand. It was so very easy to do this with Him because He was the one doing it all.

I was awake and there was a sense of joy and of God's nearness. I thanked God for the lovely dream. In response, He reminded me that I had told Him that I wanted to raise the dead when I prayed last night.

I hope that dream was prophetic and that He will allow Me to participate with Him in raising a dead person back to life. I also found myself hoping, and requesting, that God would give me more dreams like that. It is possible that it was a teaching dream instead of a prophetic dream, meant to teach me how raising the dead is really not any different than healing the sick -- that it does not take huge amounts of initiative on our part but rather simply seeing what God is doing and then doing it with Him.