It is no secret that I served as pastor for a handful of rural churches in North Carolina for close to 14 years, and left the pastorate to pursue teaching. What is a secret. however, is the fact that, in recent months, my dreams are often haunted by past church members, many who have already gone on to be with the Lord. Last night, for example, I had a strange dream where I had returned to my hometown of Wilmington and. in my childhood neighborhood, I was asked to sit in on a lady's Bible Study. For some reason, I was still a pastor (this is usually the case in the dreams where I'm visited by church members), and the Women's Group from a church over an hour away from Wilmington decided they wanted to meet with the Wilmington group on a regular basis. I sat and watched in silence as a beloved past church member, silently held my hand and gently patted it as the discussions began.
Before a formalized Bible Study could begin, two of the more outspoken ladies who were present - one from the Wilmington group, and the other from my out-of-town church - started trying to over-talk the other in a blatant display of territorialism, and the leader of the Wilmington group won out, because the Study was being held on her turf, after all. The white-haired church member didn't like this one bit, but was rendered mute by the promise of elaborate door prizes, one of which the Wilmington leader unveiled as a promise to one lucky member of the gathering. Whatever it was, it was quite ornate, with real golden trim, and dark, lush maple wood. I wasn't sure if it was a clock, or a picture, or merely a wall decoration of some sort, but as I tried to sort out what I was seeing play out before my very eyes, I began to realize that some of the women in our gathering had been dead for many, many years.
When I was a pastor, I served at least two churches where I conducted so many funerals I lost count of them. One of them had a rash of deaths amongst the elderly membership that resulted in my doing a funeral every other week for over a dozen weeks. I became so proficient at eulogizing that I was occasionally asked to do funerals for unchurched friends of my congregation, and to this day I have been informed that many of my past parishioners have clauses in their Last Will and Testament that they want me to do their funerals when they die. I don't say this to brag. Instead, I mention it because I have always had some sort of affinity with death.
I was in the room with several church members as they passed away, or shortly before they joined the dearly departed. Some passages were gentle and slow, and others were horrific and do not merit discussing. I have seen deathly ill human beings in the final stages of their existence cling to their lives with desperation and, more than once, I have been witness to instances where someone needed to be granted permission to cross over from this life to the next. I have been saluted by former military men who knew full well it would be their last interaction with me, and on one sweet occasion I was told by a veteran of World War 1, "You were a great commanding officer." I don't want to disrespect anyone who died before my very eyes, so I won't say more, but I have been in the presence of Death more than most, and at times I have a deep nagging feeling in my heart that reminds me that Death sometimes offers a final kiss that just might be the most blessed experience a human being can ever know before they cross that great, mysterious void.
Shortly after my 40th birthday, I almost died from pancreatitis that was the direct result of my being on a carb-free diet. My gall bladder fritzed out and issued gall stones into my pancreas, and my pancreatic levels were astronomically and deathly high. The doctors had to remove my gall bladder and literally vacuum out my insides to clean me out, and they kept me in the hospital for 11 days. I was over 40 pounds lighter when I was finally released. I thought for certain I was going to die before my primary surgery, and in the weeks of recovery that followed it, I was often as weak as a kitten - probably due to loss of muscle tissue.
My father died of spinal cancer at the age of 40, just shy of his 41st birthday, so my older sister was nervous before she reached 40, and so was I. Two weeks passed after my 40th birthday without incident, and then I fell deathly ill one night without warning. My sister ended up staying with me in my hospital room before the operation, and when they wheeled me back into my room after my gall bladder was removed, she could tell the terror of death had left me. But the experience changed me more than that, somehow.
After I began to grow somewhat stronger, I occasionally recalled what I would label "the kiss of death," and there were times when I was so weary that I almost wanted to experience it in its fullness because, to me, it was sweet somehow. Were it not for my wife and children, I may well have willed myself to die at the time of my greatest illness, but when my children walked into the hospital room and I saw the large eyes of my little boy, and the sheer horror on his and his sister's face when they saw me with so many tubes and wires in my nose and arms, I knew I'd need to venture on and get better. And so I did - but I was never fully free of the swoon that the allure of death placed on me.
Perhaps my pseudo romance with Death hearkens back to some latent memory I've blocked out, or perhaps it's inherent in my psyche because of my Christian belief that "to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord," but I wish I didn't look forward to my dying day and, instead, was more optimistic about the things this life has to offer.
I've dreamed of church and church members repeatedly since I stepped down from the pulpit, and only a few dead church members have made themselves known to me. More often than I dream of church members, I dream of my dead father, or my late grandfather, and my typical reaction to seeing them again is not to be shocked, but to realize they'd never really left in the first place. I just hadn't noticed their presence in a while.
Dreams are strange things. I've often had dreams where I discovered secret passages and hidden doors, and while I almost always make attempts to view these dreams as clear indicators that I've got unresolved past issues I need to deal with, in my dreams I always, always, always get excited by the awareness that I've found these unseen portals that no one else has ever noticed. Usually, when I cross over into the doorways or holes, I discover lost treasures, and I'm absolutely delighted.
Once, while visiting a church member in his 90's, he told me he'd had a very similar dream, and was elated to know his ancient home was rife with unlimited mounds of cash obscured within its walls. I asked him if he'd share any of it with me, and he laughed with twinkling eyes, but wouldn't commit to give me even a cent. It didn't matter, though, because the stories he told me about his growing-up years were priceless. He's passed now, as have most of the older congregants I've served. I sometimes wonder what they'll say when I see them on the other side. I wonder even now what they'll say if we encounter one another in a dream. But whose dream will I be dwelling in - mine, or theirs?
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