Hello! My name is Tenay, and I am addicted to the living word of God. I am always seeking to hear God’s voice more clearly so that I can obey God with gusto in my life. Today, I’d like to share about my journey receiving and interpreting prophetic dreams.
If you didn’t know, the Bible is rife with examples about how God speaks to people through dreams. Any time these dreams are about the future, they become prophetic dreams (from the Greek, pro-fess, meaning “speak before”). I like to use people’s real experiences as recorded in the Bible as invitations to level up my walk with God. That’s why when I read about Joseph and Jacob’s experiences with prophetic dreams, I knew I wanted to grow in dream interpretation. When I met today-Believers whose dreams were incredibly vivid and often prophetic, I realized I had some catching up to do.
So, I prayed and asked God to help me remember my dreams. Then, I asked for understanding on how to interpret dreams according to the examples in the Bible. That brief, eight-year journey has led to moments of success: infrequent moments, often unexciting moments, but moments nonetheless! I’ve realized that prophetic dreams are NOT a spiritual gift I received from God in abundance, so I have to continue growing in it until God says the work is done.
Today, I had another successful moment, which I would like to share with you in the hopes that it will whet your appetite to grow this spiritual gift, and give you a direction to pursue.
Dreams Like Reality
My husband is an amazing dreamer: both asleep and awake. He gets incredibly metaphorical dreams but they are very clear in what they represent. In contrast, he says that most of my dreams sound like a day in my real life: I’m at work, a person comes to me, tells me I’m going to do something, and then leaves. My dreams don’t seem wildly symbolic, but when the interpretation comes, we realize they are symbolic. The trick is to receive the interpretation of the symbolism from God through prayer.
The Army Dream
Recently, I had a dream where I was in my Army Class A uniform, graduating from the Command and General Staff College. I was in a large auditorium with my classmates and I was looking forward to getting back to my real life. One of the undersecretaries of the Army was a speaker on a panel in the graduation, where he read off a snippet from a classified needs list provided by an undisclosed partner nation. It read, “…plan to send medical tents… plan to send a mobile hospital… plan to send IVs…” He asked for volunteers to participate in this four-month TDY to the Pentagon to help plan this important mission. Nobody in the auditorium volunteered and the event ended.
As I was packing up my bags to leave, someone came up to me and said, “Hey, you just got by-name voluntold to do that planning TDY.” I replied that I didn’t want to do it; I had a civilian life to return to and I had just PCS’d my family off of active duty. “Are you going to tell the undersecretary ‘no’?” asked my peer. I realized I didn’t really have a choice, that this was the way of the Army. I went to meet up with the undersecretary to introduce myself, to try to make the best of a sucky situation.
The dream moved to the next scene in which I saw my husband and child sitting on the floor of an unfurnished apartment in Alexandria, Virginia while I slaved away in the basement of the Pentagon, a few miles away. We had made the move from Colorado to Virginia as a result of my accepting the undersecretary’s mission.
I woke up from the dream. “Dang it!” I said to my husband in real life. “God’s telling me I’m going on active duty, again! We just got off of active duty!” I exclaimed.
An Interpretation
A friend of mine walked me off the ledge later that day: “It could mean a thousand things,” she said, “none of which may mean real active duty.” That made me feel better. After all, we just got off of active duty in February and it hadn’t been three months since we moved from Maryland to Colorado on the word of God!
Fast forward to today. I decided to wander the halls of the Command and General Staff College while I was in between classes, to see if they had changed their policy on giving constructive credit for the advanced course. (I had already taken the common course a few years ago but needed this additional course to be eligible to promote to colonel.) I met with a man from the dean’s office and through my line of questioning, discovered that there was a new, four-month TDY advanced course being offered next year. It had never been offered before.
I went back to God in prayer. “Is this course the Command and General Staff College graduation in my dream?” I asked. “No, it is the four-month TDY in your dream,” God replied. “The graduation in your dream represents the common course, and this is the voluntold follow-on TDY. Just like in the dream, you feel you have no choice, but you will do it because this is the way of the Army.” “But we would have to move to Kansas to attend this course,” I replied, and “I just moved my family.” “It is a provision for you,” replied God, “because you hate distance learning courses and this is the only other option.”
It turns out that the undersecretary in the dream represented the Army, which was inviting people to attend this four-month TDY course. And God was the person who voluntold me; God was also the person who said, “Are you really gonna say no?”
No.