"Your Old Men Shall Dream Dreams"

O.K. So you KNOW you're old when God thinks your old! Yeah, that's what happened to me last week. I had a God given dream, not a vision. If it was a vision I could still claim to be young.
JOEL 2:28 ...I will pour out my Spirit on all people.
Your sons and daughters will prophesy,
your old men will dream dreams,
your young men will see visions.

I work two jobs 1st and 3rd shift. I sleep from 5pm-10pm everyday. I'm usually pretty tired and go right into deep sleep. I wake up with the alarm clock. There is no in between stage where most people have REM and remember their dreams. On my night off I sleep longer, maybe as late as 3am. That was the case Tue a week ago when I had this dream.

The Dream
I was driving north on the country road that I grew up on. Behind me to the left (drivers side) I saw a black line in the sky. Then I realized it was a swarm or flock. Suddenly it dove straight down to the ground. The car and landscape around was immediately filled with locusts and I realized that I was wearing a mask. The mask was like the medical masks that everyone is wearing for SARS and swine flu. On the side of the mask there were numbers, part of an automatic counting system, that numbered the number of times one had been bitten, stung, and swallowed bugs. Now the reason that I was in the car was to go pick up someone at school. When I got to the school it was more like a dormitory. My passenger turned out to be a Hispanic teenager. The school suddenly hit by the locust swarm was in panic. As the boy and I headed to the car people began dying. He got in the back seat and we left. Before we got out of the parking lot he died. I picked up a teenage girl who was going to her grandmothers house. The grandmother lived in a small old Cape style house all grown up with flowers and roses, like something out of a Thomas Kinkade painting. She met the girl at the door went inside and died. Then the girl died. A large fluffy cat came out of the house, now orphaned. I picked up the cat, put it into the backseat of the car, and headed home. The cat died. I woke up!
The dream troubled me for several days. I told two people that I work with about it. By Friday the troublesomeness of the dream had let me go. Then came Sunday.
Sunday I went to Church. The pastor was finishing up a series about our churches 100 year anniversary (history, people, efforts, and going forward). He is moving into a series on showing Jesus to the lost by becoming like Jesus, you know, the 5th Gospel. (“There are five Gospels. Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and the Christian, and some people will never read the first four.”
Irish Evangelist Gypsy Smith).
Well Pastor has been meeting with a group of pastors from the area for prayer every week. There is a general feeling among the group that God is about to do something big! He used this to segway from one series to the next and brought in the often quoted 2CH 7:14 which says,
"14 if my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then will I hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and will heal their land. 15 Now my eyes will be open and my ears attentive to the prayers offered in this place. 16 I have chosen and consecrated this temple so that my Name may be there forever. My eyes and my heart will always be there."
The idea was that our 100 year old church had been consecrated to him so that God's name, eyes, and heart would always be there. And that some great revival and growth was about to take place. He didn't stop there though. He called special attention to verse 13. This verse often gets left off when people quote this passage of scripture. It says,
"When I shut up the heavens so that there is no rain, or command locusts to devour the land or send a plague among my people, v 14..."
I sat there just stunned. So that is what the troubling dream was about! The locusts my not be actual bugs, but could be any manner of judgement; economy, terrorist action, natural disaster with national consequences, crop failure, and drought. The plague may be something as simple as a growth in swine flu. ( I think it must include animals though, because of the cat, in the dream) God is about to move! His people called by his name are about to get humble, really humble and pray, really pray, "then will he hear from heaven..."
It is about to happen. The Cloud/Pillar of Fire is lifting and is about to move. Get ready we're going to the mountain by way of the valley.


2CH 7:13 "When I shut up the heavens so that there is no rain, or command locusts to devour the land or send a plague among my people, 14 if my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then will I hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and will heal their land. 15 Now my eyes will be open and my ears attentive to the prayers offered in this place. 16 I have chosen and consecrated this temple so that my Name may be there forever. My eyes and my heart will always be there