Every since I was a young girl, I have often had dreams that predict something in the future. It’s never a significant something. Sometime’s it’s an old friend that I haven’t connected to in a while, who calls me the next day out of the blue. Other times it’s an odd piece of clothing that I recognize from a dream I had the night before. Once I dreamed of a friend in tears, who I found out the next day her grandmother had just passed away. At this point, I think it’s a pretty universal experience to have one of those moments where a person calls or texts you and you say to yourself, “I was just thinking about that person!” I don’t believe my dreams are prophetic in the way that we see prophecy working in the Bible. But I do think there is something mysterious about the fabric that connects us all. Like the gravitational mesh that holds the earth in the middle of space, a mesh that is affected by the presence of earth and changes shape because of it, there seems to be a mesh of spiritual gravity that connects all of us. Maybe it’s the thing we call “intuition” or a “sixth sense.” So many of us, due to the busyness of life, become numb to our bodies, and the inner voice of truth that speaks in the silence of stillness. It is the still small voice that tells us uncomfortable truths. Recently I had a dream, which is sometimes my body’s way of telling me things that I do not want to hear. In this dream, I was in a rainy marsh in the middle of no distinct place. There were various animals around in the greenery, many taking shelter because of the rain. A family of finches sheltered in a bush; a mom and several babies puffing their bodies and fluffing their feathers to keep the rain from soaking into their coats. Suddenly, I see a lost little duckling, soaking wet and dragging its little feet on the muddy ground. It was all alone. Tired, hungry, and lost. The little duckling was trying to drink from the muddy waters beneath his feet, and began to get sicker the more he drank from the contaminated streams. My compassion went out to this little duckling and I gathered his little body into my arms and brought him to a nearby pool. The water was cleaner. Immediately he took a drink and life began to be restored to his weary little body. He began swimming after the tiny crawfish that darted beneath him. Suddenly he got stuck in the sand below and soon would drown without my help. I quickly dug him out of the sand and brought him back to the surface. But now I was worried. How would this little duckling be able to survive on his own? I turned my back for just a moment and death was close at his heels. I gathered him into my arms once again, and this time as I did so, something strange happened, as in dreams they often do. I could see him trying to contort his little body into the shape of a finch. Like the family of finches we had seen earlier--he was trying to be like one of the little ones. He not only wanted, but needed to be accepted into this family of finches in order to survive. Afterall he was all alone. But in order to survive, he had to make changes that were painful to him and deceitful to himself. He had to become something he was not, in order for others to love him. My heart grew deeply sad as I watched this duckling change his shape. Something about him deeply resonated with myself and how I operated in the world. We are not a species that can survive in isolation. We must have community. As someone who was born of an afro-latina immigrant mother, I come from a long history of women, people groups, who often have to contort themselves in ways that are painful and destructive in order to find acceptance in the struggle for survival. I began to ask myself, “What ways have you molded yourself and contorted your identity for the sake of survival? What Bible characters can you think of that needed to do the same?”For starters, I’d venture to say, most of all the women. Living in a patriarchal society, women lived and still do live at a disadvantage. This disadvantage forces them to accept norms, and double standards, that they would not have to accept, if they were truly equal. I was recently scrolling through my Twitter feed, and read this quote from @_bryana_joy, another woman who is tired of the gendered discrimination that women often face at the hands of religious leaders. She wrote, “I want @garyLthomas (& @Zondervan!) to know that for an untold number of women, his words in Married Sex are triggering trauma responses & great anguish this week. We. are. tired. We are so, SO tired of being told that men desperately need sex & we don't. We are SO tired of being told that our bodies have an almost-mystical power over men & that we need to use our sexuality strategically to retain our husbands' affection. We are so tired of being treated like a separate species primarily defined by our sex appeal. I want @garyLthomas to know what it's like to be a woman ...
