A vision: I lie there in a bed. I’m in a hospital. I can tell by the cadent mood set on the faces of my family and close friends around me that the news for me isn’t good. I have cancer. It looks terminal. I feel the pain, and not simply the physical pain of my ailing body, but the altogether hideous and vagrant pain highlighted by the rancid spectrum of poignantly sorrowful emotion. This is real.
This, of course, is not true. Not yet, anyway.
A Simple Vision
This vision came to me whilst I just sat with my wife in church waiting for the band to play one recent Sunday. It was over in the flash of a blinking eye. Then simply my imagination went to work.
I don’t think I’m particularly gifted by these visions as I think God puts these before all of us, and for a reason—if we want them.
My attribution for the above vision was that it was a preparatory vision—simply building in me, at least, the strength to deal with such a harrowing concept should it happen. In reality it could happen anytime. It is, after all, the reality for a million-and-more people right now, and that doesn’t even factor in those sweetly in their remission to this disease; just one form of a myriad of despicable slurs on creation.
Visions of Life Importance – the Series
I wrote Part 1 and Part 2 to describe what I feel are the sorts of visions that Christians should most definitely sow into and pray for. Both proclaim the keys as to the warnings of life and how they might be appropriately heeded, and the opportunities that are there for any of us to grab.
This is what life is about.
It’s about being prepared in the appropriate measures of godly wisdom—these to receive. It’s also about being aware, awake and alive so as to peel away those things that God has for all of us—these to take.
Going Further ‘Into’ the Vision Above
Why would I be afraid of such a horrible vision? It was actually quite beautiful, simply because God cared enough to make me aware of the possibility of my imminent potential decline and death.
It is impetus also to love my family even more, having only recently lost someone close enough to family to know afresh the chilling and lasting sting of death upon those left behind.
Living on the other side of this sort of vision ensures that I’ll not live flippantly.
Seeing ourselves in our deaths is not a bad or morbid thing at all—it is simply our inevitable destiny. Visions of death, in this way, can give our lives just so much more meaning.
Besides all this, visions as portrayed here, are life-giving gifts beckoning each of us to God and to his ways.
© 2010 S. J. Wickham.
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