Not too heavy

For a few weeks now, I've visited blogs that have sported the "Pour Your Heart Out" button and I've thought, "I couldn't do that." Sure, I've whined and ranted here, but I'm not sure that I've ever really poured my heart out.

For some reason, today feels like the right time. I was reading some entries on a message board about dreams and people visiting us in our dreams and it made me think of this experience. So, even though the Pour Your Heart Out blog carnival officially happens on Wednesdays, I'm posting mine today -- before I lose the nerve.

It happened about three or four years ago. I was at a very spiritually low point in my life. I missed Mass frequently. I rarely prayed and when I did it was either unemotional, memorized prayer or frantic pleadings asking God to fix whatever was urgently wrong in my life. I became more and more wrapped in my own life’s drama and less and less aware of and available to people who might need what I had to offer. For all practical purposes, God was dead to me and I, in turn, found myself emotionally dead as well.

I may have turned my back on the Lord, but He continued to pursue me. I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that He sent Jesus to visit me in a dream one night.

In this dream, I was walking in a small town when someone invited me to come meet Jesus. I went into what looked like a beach house and waited with five or six other people whom I didn't know. Soon we were ushered into a room where Jesus stood at the front. One by one, we approached him and spoke to him.

I was skeptical that this really was the Son of God. When it was my turn to stand in front of him, I quizzed him – where had I gone to high school, what were my pets' names? Of course he knew.

Realizing that I was in the presence of Jesus, I pulled my arms into my chest and leaned into him, craving his comfort. He reached out and picked me up. I was horrified! I was so fat. Certainly too fat for him to lift me.

“No!” I cried out. “Put me down, I am too heavy!”

To which Jesus replied, as he held me in his arms, “Nothing is too heavy for me.”

I awoke from that dream with an eerie sense of peace and an absolute assurance that I had been in the presence of Christ and nothing is too heavy for him.

At first, I felt like that dream was about my weight. That it didn't matter to Jesus what I weighed -- and at that point in my life, maybe that was what it was about -- giving me permission to stop beating myself up for weight.

In the years since that dream, it's come to mean so much more. Since that blessed encounter, there has been some heavy stuff in my life -- and I'm not just talking my hind end. People tell me that I am so strong when in reality I sometimes wonder if I can get out of bed. When my feet hit the floor, it is sometimes by the grace of God.

And then there are times when I do feel strong. When I feel like I can physically and emotionally take on the world. Those are moments of grace, too, when I try to be mindful enough to say "Thank you, Jesus" for this day, for this feeling, for this life.

Regardless of whether it's a day when I'm tying a knot and hanging on or it's one where I'm ready to take a victory lap, I will always be grateful and humbled by the experience of that dream.