“I love you too…”

I have stated before and I affirm it again. Our dreams have a purpose and meaning in the sovereign providence of our Sovereign God, but at the same time our discerning of the purpose and meaning of those dreams are minutely fragmentary at best, and the pursuit of the purpose and meaning of a particular dream is fraught with peril unless Joseph Ben-Jacob or an exiled Hebrew in Babylon by the name of Daniel is around to give us the interpretation. Nonetheless I have from time to time found it helpful to set down an account of particular and peculiar dreams that have struck me at a very deep personal and emotional level, and such is the dream I now type to this screen.

It was such a brief and fleeting encounter. There were the two of us. It was as though I was on one side of the room and she was on the other. We were sitting at an angle from one another to each other’s right. I never did clearly see her full face. She appeared to be early to mid-twenties or so. Her hair hung down long on her right side with a gentle wave. The color of her hair was a light brown with several darker shades of brown weaved in. I did not recognize her as anyone I have ever known or met.

But yet somehow I did recognize her. I don’t remember if there was an audible voice or not but somehow her identity reverberated through my mind.

“She is your daughter…”

I looked at her and she somewhat shyly looked back. She did not look at all like my two beloved living daughters. The words came welling out of my being; whether I spoke them aloud or somehow communicated mind to mind with her, I do not know. The words came from my heart and soul.

“I love you…”

She looked at me again somewhat shyly and the words softly and quietly came out of her as an arrow to the very center of my heart.

“I love you too…”

The scene faded…. I awoke. My first thoughts were, “Where did that come from!” “What was that all about?”

As I pondered the dream that I had just awoken from, I started feeling a sense of loss and grief; an increasing sense of loss and grief that brought tears to my eyes. That back and forth ebb and flow of of loss and grief stayed with me through the early part of the morning; several times bringing me to tears again.

Her words kept echoing through my heart, “I love you too…”

Who was she? That was the most bewildering part of it all. I have only known one woman in my life; my wife, the mother of my two living daughters. The young lady in this dream was someone entirely different from those two daughters.

My wife could see there was something bothering me and asked about it. I told her about my dream. About 34 years ago we had experienced a miscarriage in a very early pregnancy. Over the years we had thought of that child as being the son we, in God’s providence, never had. Is it possible that child lost in miscarriage was actually another daughter? Or is it possible there was another miscarriage that happened so early in pregnancy that we never knew there had been a loss? We do not know.

I asked my wife what we would have named her if we had been given another daughter. She mentioned several names, than asked me what name I would have liked for her.

“Angela ... Because she is dancing with the angels…”

And inextricably in my mind the name of the young lady in my dream identified as “my daughter” became Angela, and if she be real or not, to me that will always be her name.

How is it I grieve and feel loss for someone I never knew existed?

I don’t know…..

I do know that if, Lord willing, I ever see her again, and I sincerely want to, her name is Angela…

Powerful words these are even in a dream…

“I love you too…”

September 24, 2015