Searching for Jesus

Well yay -- I woke up to that recent all too familiar feeling of sweat plastered hair and a soggy shirt followed by cold sweats as I walk to the bathroom with my eyes half closed. The same dream... AGAIN.

The dream: It always starts with the little nativity set under my Christmas tree. Somehow in my dream-state reality the nativity set turns into the size of my used-to-be dining room converted into a remote learning room/dog kennel room/catch-all room where my tree sits in front of the only windows where the festive multi-color lights will be visible to the road out front. (This is all a festive guise to the world that we somehow have it all together in this house--but that's a blog post for another day.)

Anyway, back to the dream. The small nativity set warps into a life size nativity taking up the whole room with me leaving my home & walking into the actual scene like through some secret portal that can only happen in dreams or through the closet to Narnia I suppose. I talk to and walk freely among the shepherds and they nod approvingly as I am like them; an unworthy wandering soul. As I approach the manger scene though Mary has her face averted away from me and down towards the manger, unmoving. Joseph is standing staring at Mary's face, also unmoving and avoiding my eye contact. As I look down into the manger there it sits empty. It sits at the center of the nativity scene with star & moonlight shining down upon the clean straw meant to comfort baby Jesus but it is completely empty each time I look into it every time I have this dream the last few weeks. I end up literally searching for Jesus who belongs in this manger scene. Some nights it's a short dream. Other nights it seems as though I'm searching so desperately to find him that I run & fall & scream & cry repeatedly until I'm utterly exhausted in my dream.

Some have asked me why I was looking for baby Jesus, or if I was somehow infatuated with babies, or even what I ate before going to sleep. Others said it represented how much I despise the commercialism of the holidays or that I need to google dream interpretation websites. I don't need to do that because I already know.

You see I know the dream is a metaphor. It's a metaphor for desperately searching for the hope that baby Jesus represents in that manger scene. It's a metaphor for me searching for where God is in the middle of my mess this year. Despite having admittedly one of the toughest years of my life I still was able to cling to Jesus.

Things were well with my soul... that is until they weren't.