Tuesday, January 10, 2012

8
Comment

My Car Ride With Francis Chan

Last night I had a dream that I was sitting in the back seat of a car driving around the streets of 1950ish Clearwater, Florida.

Everything I saw in my dream had a yellowish tint to it, like the way the Cohen brothers filmed the movie “No Country For Old Men.”

At some point in my dream the scene shot changed and I saw who was driving the car. It was Francis Chan (or it could have been Daniel Dae Kim from Hawaii Five-O…I don’t know…Francis is bald, right? Daniel has hair…well this guy had hair…but looked like Francis Chan).

Anyway, Francis Chan was driving the car, in my dream, with a wig on, trying to look like Daniel Dae Kim.

Whoever it was, we had that “wiser older Master Po Asian guy / young David Carradine grasshopper thing from Kung Fu” going on in the back of an old Studebaker cruising the streets pasts palm trees and shiny new houses.

At some point Francis looks in the rear-view mirror and says, “I don’t see it. Brian, I don’t see the obedience in your life.”

This is normal for Francis Chan, known for his persona of radical obedience to scripture (I had just been listening to a Catalyst podcast with Francis the day before – which is probably why he was on my mind).

Looking up from the Bible I was reading, I locked eyes with his in the mirror and defensively said, “You don’t know me. You don’t know me at all.”

Then he pulled the car over, put it into park, and turned around.

Wiping away a single teardrop slowly falling from his right eye, he said, “Brian, I’m just being honest. I just don’t see it.”

And then I woke up.

Dream Interpretation Options:

  • If Francis Chan carjacks your Studebaker wearing a wig, keep calm and no-one will get hurt. At some point he’ll pull the car over and start crying. Then you can make your move.
  • God is calling me to move back to Clearwater, Florida (where I lived in the mid 90’s), but only after everyone gets jaundice.
  • I was having a conversation with myself – a continued conversation I’ve been having lately – about greater levels of simple obedience to the teachings of Jesus.

I’ll go with option #3.

in Living It Out
  • http://jonstolpe.wordpress.com Jon Stolpe

    Francis Chan? That would be a pretty cool meeting.

    I’d go with option 3. I’m hoping you’ll have some of this conversation out loud here on your blog. Simple obedience to the teachings of Jesus seems like a great place to base 2012 (and the rest of our lives)!

    • Brian Jones

      I agree Jon. Simple obedience – he says, I do it, no questions asked – is how I’ve been rethinking how 2012 will be different for me.

      • http://jonstolpe.wordpress.com Jon Stolpe

        But doesn’t that go against our natural tendency to be in control and to question? :)

  • Mark Falcone

    Well sure, go with number 3, but number 1 is good information as well.

  • http://tiltedwords.blogspot.com Diane Karchner

    Obedience. I agree with Jon. Control, ego, pride…all align to sabotage what we know in our hearts to be right. Keep going, Bri. You are on the right track. I’m with Jon in hoping that we see how you work it through right here on the blog.

  • Tom Jones

    Yea, number 3 for sure, but you’re weird. You need to get more sleep.

  • http://sorensblog.blogspot.com Mike Kjergaard

    Great dream/story, but Frances’ shedding of a single tear triggered a memory, and now I’m stuck on the iconic image of that 1970′s anti-littering campaign — you know the one with the Native American shedding a tear over litter. The human mind is a weird thing, eh?

    So obey Jesus. And also, don’t litter :-)

  • Tracey Axnick

    Hmmm… I’m still stuck on the fact that your dream had a ‘”yellowish tint”‘… like “No Country For Old Men”‘.
    There wasn’t a terrifying villain with a Dorothy Hamill haircut and a limp in this dream, was there….?
    Just checking.

    Yeah, I’d go with option 3 too.
    And for the record, I think dreams are sometimes the way that God whispers into our hearts… when he can’t seem to get our attention during waking hours….

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