In real life, I read an email yesterday from a Physician's Assitant from Bethel Church, California. She is currently serving as a missionary to Mozambique. The way visas work there, missionaries have to go to South Africa every 30 days to get their visa renewed. She was driving back from that renewal, still in South Africa when she saw a terrible accident where a bus full of migrant workers ran off the road and bodies when flying every direction.
As a medical person, she stopped to help. She acted as a triage nurse, stationing volunteers and each body (most were alive but some were dead), showing them what first aid technique to do for the person and also teaching them to pray a simple prayer for Jesus to heal them. She placed one person with a lady who was dead and terribly mutilated from the accident. A little later, the volunteer by that dead woman began to scream. "She called out wildly because the dead woman had groaned, turned her head around and begun to breath again. I could see her moving so I ran over to recheck her and to my amazement, her vital signs were quite strong. Not only that, her misplaced eye was back in its socket, she had regained consciousness and was spitting out blood."
The email went on to discuss some other healings that happened as the volunteers (most of them unsaved) prayed for healing in Jesus name. The missionary's first name is Tracy, and I don't know her last name. Anyhow, I was thrilled and encouraged by her report. I remember praying a brief prayer for God to start doing that sort of thing in the USA as well. "Do it here too, Lord! Do it here too, Lord!"
Then I had a scare of my own related to my husband being missing and "unaccounted for" for an hour due to being stuck in bad traffic related to a large fire not far from our home. I had not been able to get in touch with him at work by phone all day, which was unusual. Then he was an hour late to pick me up for something he really wanted to go to that evening. Ed is never more than 5 or 10 minutes late and here he was a whole hour late. I began to worry that perhaps he'd been in a car accident. I began to pray and ask God if he were ok and to please keep him safe. God answered me that Ed was fine, but He did not tell me why Ed was so late. However, I was not sure that was really God's voice or maybe my own heart/mind telling me what I wanted to hear.
So when Ed got home an hour late, I was very relieved. The stress of not knowing what was going on with Ed, combined with being very late for our evening activity and trying to negotiate traffic, put the resurrection report completely out of my conscious thinking. It was a busy evening and when we finally got home, I was tired and went right to bed. Ed stayed up for a while in another room.
It was one of those "neat nights" where an angel came and spoke to me for a little while just before I went to sleep. I love it when I get these angelic visitations -- I wish they would happen more often. We did not discuss the email from Tracy in Mozambique or anything about raising the dead. So, that email was not in my conscious thinking.
Probably about 5:00 AM this morning, I had a dream. In the dream, I was just returning from a missions trip to Africa and I had been away for four weeks. In the dream, my grandfather had died shortly after I'd left for the missions trip and they'd not been able to contact me because I'd be so remote that there was no telephone service. When I got back I learned that my grandfather had died and been embalmed, and that they'd held his body for four weeks so that I could attend his funeral.
[In real life, my father had died when I was on a three week missions trip to India, and I was so remote that it took them two days to contact me with the news and then took another 5 days for me to travel home. In real life, I expected to miss his funeral, but they "held it a week longer than usual" so that I was able to attend. So the concept of postponing the funeral for a long time so that I could be there was not alien to me. Also, in real life, both of my grandfathers had been dead for over 30 years.]
The next scene in the dream was that I was in a back room of a church with my grandfather's body. I had just arrived back from the missions field and had been taken from the airport to the church for the funeral service. It would start in about 1/2 hour and I was being given some time to privately view the body and say goodbye to him.
The body was laid out on a metal table instead of being in the coffin. (That is unusual in real life, but in the dream it seemed quite natural.) They were going to give me about 20 minutes with him and then put him back in the coffin and bring the coffin into the sanctuary for the funeral service. There was a technician from the mortuary in the room with me, trying to stay quietly out of my way in the background, to give me the illusion of being alone with my grandfather. I went over to the body. In real life I don't remember what my father's father looked like, I only met him once when I was small and we did not have any photographs of him. In the dream, he did not look anything like my real-life father had looked, but he was a kind looking elderly man who was a bit overweight and bald, with liver spots on his head.
I went over to his body and it moved. I have heard that the contraction of gases can sometimes make corpses move, and I assumed that is what it was. Then the body sort of jerked and fell off of the far side of the table. I did not want to touch a dead body, so I asked the mortuary technician to please take care of the fallen body. He was about to come over when I heard the body groaning. I rushed round the table and bent over him. He was laying on his side, and he moved. He had put a hand up to hold his head like he had a headache. I remember thinking briefly to myself that it was impossible for him to do that since he'd been dead for four weeks and since he'd been embalmed. He continued to groan. The mortuary technician backed away, unsure what to make of this. He would not come over to where we were.
The minister came in about then to see if we were ready to move the casket to the sanctuary. He told me that many people had already arrived. I told him, "I'm afraid we will have to cancel the funeral. We seem to have had a resurrection."
Then I helped my grandfather sit up. I asked him how he felt. He said that he felt horrible, with a terrible sore throat. I wrapped one arm around his back and placed my other hand on his throat and prayed for him for healing for his throat. Then I helped him to stand up.
He walked out of the church and we went across the street to a near-by restaurant, hoping to sit down and talk to each other privately. But, of course, the people attending the funeral followed us across the street to the restaurant and wanted to talk to him, to see him, to touch him. Grandpa choose to interact with them instead of talking privately with me. I had the impression that he wanted to tell them about God. Just before he got up to walk over to them, I asked him if his throat was better. He said, "Sorry, but it's not. It still hurts."
Then he got up and walked over to the people and began to witness to them. I had mixed feelings, part of me wanted to keep him to myself for those first few minutes, to talk to him privately. But part of me understood that God had raised him for a purpose and that he had to go and fulfill that purpose. So I got up and went over to where he was talking to the crowd, and began to listen to what he was saying.
I never got to hear his message, because that is when I woke up. The sweetness of the Lord was around me when I woke up. That is one of the ways that I recognize when a dream is from God. It was just barely dawn and I was still tired, so I fell back asleep. I had a second dream, but that was a natural dream, something about going to a baseball game with my husband. I think the Lord allowed me to have a natural dream right after a God-sent dream, so I could see and recognize the difference between the two types of dreams.
This is the second resurrection dream that I have had in a three week period. I know of other people who have been having resurrection dreams as well. The dreams all seem to have a common element. In each of the dreams, the Lord raises the person from the dead without Christians praying for that person to be raised... that clearly the glory goes to God and not to any individual. I believe that is symbolic of God's willingness to raise the dead in Western Cultures, such as the USA, Canada, England and Europe. In real life, I suspect that God will use His children to pray for the dead and see them raised, but it will be He who actually answers the prayers and raises the dead back to life again.
I believe that God is releasing these resurrection dreams, as well as real-life resurrection reports returning from third-world countries, to raise the faith level of the Western Church. I believe God wants us to expect and pray for and have faith for Him to raise the dead in our midst. I am not sure if this is only weeks away, or months away or if it is still a few years away. But I hardly wait for it to start happening here! I can hardly wait for God to glorify His name by raising the dead in our midst.
Look forward to it, people! It is coming!
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