This was a Seriously Ridiculous dream I had and not sure what to do about yet.

The rules: no stealing, no drinking alcohol, no smoking, you have to eat what we eat and together, sleep when we all sleep. If you mess up we may show you grace once but afterwards we have to let you go. You are only here if you want to be here if you don’t want to be here then you must leave because you will not change unless you want to change.

There was a place I went to in my dream. I believed it was somewhere in Asia or something like Thailand but the people were not all Asian they had dark skin most of them as if they were black but a couple had lighter skin. At any rate in my dream I went to this place to help out where they brought in kids from off the streets or kids from families who were addicted to drugs and alcohol and they helped provide for all of these kids. They had a very large garden and a cook who cooked everything. The facilities were very large as they had lots of rooms for kids to stay in with beds in them. Also there were facilities for people who came in and helped out as well. The amount of property that this placed had for their entire location was like 30,000 or 3,000 acres I think it was 30,000 (that just seems like so much though). In this location they would care and provide for the kids like and orphanage. These kids would have classes and things of that nature where they would learn normal school things and the woman who ran the place would go out in to the market every week to buy vegetables and spices and always wind up bringing back a kid with them who was living on the street. I think that we would also sell some of the vegetables and stuff from the garden in the market to help provide for the centers general needs.

In my dream the lady who ran the location wanted to get some extra spices but didn’t have any money to get them from the market so she decided to ask the neighbor whose house, a very large house too, was directly across from where the kitchen faced. When she asked the lady for the spices the lady replied that she didn’t have any to spare. The neighbor lady was standing on the balcony of the 2nd story of her house and had a friend with her as well. Both were a bit older and quite stuck up but they were curious about how we constantly kept bringing in new children as they believed that buy doing this center, or whatever it was, it gave us a right to ask people for things and expect it in return. So, the next day the neighbor lady and her friend went out to market and brought a few kids back with them and I was shocked because I knew these women were not doing this to help the children but rather they were doing this to make themselves look good and possibly have people give them things. I became so mad that I went over to the house and confronted them about what they were doing and asked them where they took the kids from. At that point the women began defending themselves saying that they had every right to help kids as we were doing at the center but the problem was they weren’t really helping the kids they just wanted it to be about themselves looking good.

After spending only a short time arguing I decided to leave. It was like arguing with a brick wall and trying to convince it that it really isn’t made of brick but of sand. I kept looking out of the front door of the center and over at the house where the neighbor lived to keep an eye on the kids and think of a way to bring them to the center where they could actually receive help and care from people who genuinely cared for them. I even made an attempt once to bring the kids over to the center but they wanted to stay where they were at so I left them but I kept an eye on the place because I wanted to know how the woman got the children there. At one point a woman showed up to the door of the neighbors house with a child with her and dropped off the child as the two women gave her money. I was enraged and went over to the two women who now had the child and went off on them about how they had been giving women money to take their children off of their hands. When the two women wouldn’t listen to reason I ran after the mother who sold her child to the neighbor. By the time I caught up with her we were in the city area again and people were following me as I was asking this woman how she could sell her child. The woman was obviously someone who had struggled with drugs but she seemed sane enough to tell me that she couldn’t take care of the kid properly and that the kid didn’t really want to be with her. So I told her how the child loved her and would wait for her and didn’t care what she was like because he wanted to be with his mother. The mother just responded that she couldn’t take care of him. She said that she loved him but she just couldn’t do it. I responded with something that sounds cheesy now but I asked her “isn’t love enough.” By now she was getting in to a taxi and an African American guy and another Caucasian man were following me and the Caucasian guy had a camera but I was left just broken for the child, the woman and all the families in the area.

As I walked back to the center with the two men still following me while I talked to myself out loud about not being able to understand why love isn’t enough I began to realize that what we were doing at the center wasn’t enough. My heart was so heavy that I realized that it wasn’t just enough to take the kids out of the streets and give them opportunities and care for them but it had to be done for the whole families. Women and their children needed a place to go where they could change their lives and people could minister to them and help them change their lives. I don’t think I realized this but I was still saying all of this out-loud and woman began to gather with their children and I began to encourage them to come to the center too where they could change their lives and not have to live on the streets anymore.

When I returned to the center I called out for the lady who oversaw the ministry and she wanted to know what was going on and I began to tell her how what we were doing wasn’t enough. We couldn’t just provide a place just for kids anymore it had to be for the whole family if we were going to make any real difference in people’s lives. She began to ask how we would be able to do this or make this happen and what kind of rules we would have. One thing she wasn’t concerned about was the facilities. We owned so much property that we could spread the center out enough so we could have buildings for everything we needed to help these people. So, as I was saying to the overseer that I didn’t know how it would work but it had to happen because what we were doing wasn’t enough anymore the doors for the whole building were surrounded by women with children, women without children, and a couple of men some just looking for a place to get some free food while others were looking for a real life change. We decided to just let them in and they went everywhere looking through everything and so my boss again asked me how we would do this and I said we could have rules and so I then explained the rules to her and then she shouted. She began to explain to the women and men that were there that it would be a place where people who wanted to change their lives could come and find a safe place where they would receive help and provision but that there were rules to be followed. She then explained the rules. When she began to start telling the few rules we had a woman began to put something in her pocket so we decided to add on No Stealing to one of the rules because everything we had was shared.

The whole time this was going on I felt like I would burst out in tears for these people because my heart was so broken but after the rules were said some people left but many stayed. I went into one room and found a couple women with their children sitting on a bed and they told me they had nowhere else to go and they didn’t want me to kick them out so I told them the rules if they wanted to stay and so they stayed. But again the whole time I just felt like crying. And then, I could see people that I had worked in other ministries with coming to this location to help out and the place growing and things happening that we had set out to do in a short time. The whole time I felt like my heart would burst because it was so heavy and full of joy.

And then… I woke up.