Grace and Truth column

I rarely remember my dreams. I wake up and they dissolve quickly. But when I do remember one, it stays with me.

In one dream, I am sitting in a car. There is someone with me, but I cannot say who. It is night. The road is deserted. It is a country road, in the middle of nowhere. I hear crickets. My companion and I seem to be waiting.

While we wait, we talk—about our need to get to our destination, about not being able to get there, about other things I cannot recall.

It seems there are miles to go. I don’t know why we are stopped. Perhaps we ran out of gasoline. Perhaps it is just one of those inexplicable things that happen in dreams. No matter. We sit in the car and wonder when we’ll ever arrive. So many miles to go.

Many of the dreams I remember are what I call anxiety dreams. The classic is one left over from seminary days. The semester is over, and I suddenly realize I’ve not attended a particular class at all, that I’ve skipped the whole semester. Now it is finals time, and I am doomed to fail.

More recently, I have dreamt that it is Sunday morning. I need to be at church to preach the sermon. But everything conspires against my getting there on time. I can’t find my car keys, I can’t find the sermon, my shoes are missing.

These are dreams I leave gratefully. I wake up and offer thanks that it was only a bad dream.
The dream I’m telling you about fits the anxiety dream model, with my needing to be somewhere and not being able to do so. But I don’t recall feeling that familiar anxiety. I don’t recall rushing around frantically or expressing frustration with my companion. We sit in the car and wait.

Dawn finally arrives. And, with all the logic of a dream, our car starts, and off we go. And lo and behold, our destination is just around the next corner. It is not miles and miles away. We start the car and drive a short distance, and there we are. What we were seeking is right there in front of us, just beyond the bend, not far away at all.

Then I awake and remember. But I feel no relief. If anything, I feel a sadness not unlike nostalgia, that feeling we get when we remember a good moment or a good place or a good event from the past—warm and melancholy all at once. That’s the feeling I have when I wake up. It’s like I’ve been somewhere good and missed it from the moment I left.

Our life in Christ is a life filled with waiting. We don’t sit on our hands or our laurels. We work and worship. We do our part in sharing the hope we have within us. We proclaim the Lord’s death and resurrection. We do all the things disciples have done since the church began.

And one of those things is waiting—for the fulfillment of the gospel promise, for Christ to return, for the redeeming of the whole creation, for the work begun on the cross to come to its completion. Our life in Christ is filled with waiting—for something we know already in part and just enough to make us long for more.

But sometimes it seems our waiting will never end. Sometimes it seems our destination is miles away. Sometimes we may wonder if our hope is no more solid than air. Sometimes we may feel like we are driving toward a goal we’ll never reach.

But the dawn will come. And we will discover that what we’ve dreamed about, what we’ve longed for, what we’ve hoped for against every hope, is right there before us. It was there all along. Just around the next bend.

On that day we will awaken from our dream of waiting and be glad.

Ron Adams is pastor at East Chestnut Street Mennonite Church in Lancaster, Pa.