No, this blog is about my first "Joshua" walk, as I have decided to call it.  "What be that?," you ask?  Well, you'd use proper grammar of course, but I've decided to start taking walks, and attempt to, once peice together, walk around the entire city of Cornwall, using the streets of Headline, Power dam, Boundary, and Water as boundries... But much more than just excercise... I've decided to use the time walking as praying for the city.  No matter what other prayer requests might be there, I've just decided to take that time to pray, intercede, and believe God for my city.  Hopefully that doesn't come across as prideful or arrogant, I'm simply trying to inform.... If you wanna join me, please do....  Ironically, I'm actually outside that boundary, so maybe God will only save those in it...

Anyways, today I decided to take my first one.  I biked one boundary road a couple days ago, but today was the first walk/run/jog/pant, sweat, and die...  It was good....  Really good....  I just....  I just pray God will give me more love...  Bigger arms...  I just want to see this city transformed.....

Anyways, this post wasn't entirely about random rants....  

I started playing a recently aquired song, "I want to know," by Brian Cooney, which I have pretty much been in love with since first hearing it....  It's from the point of view of a non-Christian, basically wondering if there might be more to life....  Here's the lyrics:

I walk alone in this world of darkness

It's the only life I have known

Not really sure what will come tomorrow

I don't really have any answers at all

What is this light they are talking about?

Who sets these prisoners free?

What is this love that is reaching out?

I want to know, I want to know

Is it real?

I want to know what it really means to be alive

I want to know how it feels to be free

I want to know, who is this Jesus Christ

That He would die for me?

No where to run

When my sky is falling

There's no one holding my hand

No where to turn

When the devil comes calling

I can't find no shelter in man

First, verse... Umm... 9

"⁹ Do not grumble against one another, brethren, lest you be condemned. Behold, the Judge is standing at the door! "

Okay, so....  This is going to be very random and very weird and strange, and maybe kinda depressing...  'Cause that's basically my emotions right now... Oh... And tired....  Yeah..

*Pulls out "Dream Symbol Interpretation," the 7-page deal given by Barry Russel when he talked at Youth, like forever ago...  And begins the post...

So yeah.... Dreams....  It's extremely ironic that I was just talking about how weird it was to me that dad had a bad dream last night, 'cause I didn't think adults had bad dreams for some reason.... And yeah, I'm officially an adult...  That, was definitely a bad dream.... 

Okay, so I'm probably being really dramatic now, but you gotta understand that I'm really tired..  

What?  There's no interpretation for "ring" in here?  Goodness....  I thought there would be..

Okay... So... Dog....  Interesting, interesting...

Sorry, here goes my dream:

Basically... It's weird, 'cause I think I had a dream like before the one I'm about to tell you, and then "woke up" inside of my dream, thinking all was okay and I wouldn't have any more bad dreams, only to "fall asleep" again within my dream, never actually coming to a consciousness in my room, and then finally waking up about half an hour ago...

So starting with the "waking up," this being inside my dream, I remember thinking that, whatever dream I had prior to "waking up" needed to be written down, because it had amazing details, and specific things...  I don't remember any of that, or even if there was a dream before that fake awakening, but I do remember, in this false awakened state, hearing some cries or wails, and discounting them as Jacob, my newly-arrived nephew, in the other room... Which... It could've been in real life too.  But I think the cries in my awakened-dream state were coming from a house outside my window, and this whole "crying" business might make more sense in a bit...

So my dream, or at least what I can remember of it, basically consisted of a battle over a ring, which I only just remembered recently... A ring...  That was made out of some wood or something, was rather flimsy, and might've even had some thorns in it....  I'm not sure if that's significant, with a correlation to Jesus' crown of thorns, but yeah...  I think I had one guy who was "on my team" so to speak, throughout the dream, but no one specific that I could describe or anything.  I just remember repeated times being chased by one guy, who was kinda the leader from what I could tell, who had a dog with him, at least for part of the dream, and another guy, who, thinking of him now, had a red hat on I believe...  They kept battling for the ring, and while at times it kinda seemed just like a play, other times the emotions I felt within the dream were...  Really awful.  Being pursued by these two men, and the dog, who at times seemed friendly....  While I'm sure there were many more cycles, they are mostly getting jumbled up in my brain....  This might inspire laughter out of most of you, and that's totally fine... I would probably laugh too... This is more to get my thoughts organized....  But here is kinda the last part of the dream, to the best of my rememberance...

I was sitting somewhere, in a specific room, and I had the ring object that was apparently being contested over, and was playing with it.  Suddenly something shot from out of nowhere and knocked it out of my hands...  Or.... Maybe it was the guy I was with... Anyways, both me and.... Him?  Not sure if it was a specific gender, but let's call "him" larry...  So me and larry, along with the two other bad guys and their dog, raced after to where we thought it was, still in a building that, thinking back on it, bears some similarities in design with the school building that our church turned into the daycare.... Weird....  Anyways, we got over there, still kind of inside, though there was a car randomly there, and started looking for it.  Someone seemed to think that me and larry had found the ring and had hidden it in the tire of one of the cars, so one of the guys, who apparently can change into squirrels (yeah, this part is strange....  Not sure if this means anything....  lol...), dug into the tire, but came out without the ring, since we hadn't found it yet....  But then I did find it, on the ground, and quickly grabbed it, trying to make sure no one noticed the movement.  Some other things happened, but nothing I can organize enough to put down here...  Anyways, eventually I found out that the guy with the red hat (this being one of the "bad" guys) did notice my movement, 'cause he asked me what had happened when I put my hand up to my chest, which apparently is what I did when I found the wooden ring.  Grasping for some convincing lie, I told him I lost something.... And then added, without reason as I look back, that things inside my chest were just going weird, and in my dreamstate that made a lot more sense than it does now.    Anyways, I followed him down as he encouraged me to find whatever I had lost.... Only, he went a different way, down some other stairs, into an even DEEPER (yes, emphasis... Explaination later) place, and as I started to follow him, it occured to me that I had done that before, following this guy down to a deeper place, or at least gone this far, and that, whatever was down there, it was going to be extremely bad.  Realizing that going down there would probably mean being cornered and.... I dunno, something-ed, I retreated back up the stairs, only to see the other "bad" dude and the dog coming down some other stairs, so I took of running, and took a different flight up stairs to the top level.  At this point I was feeling extremely afriad of confronting the two of them again, so I started looking for a window out of the building where I could jump out, but I couldn't find any.  I finally decided to simply jump out, off of the stair landing, and, wherever I landed, maybe it would bring escape from this place (yes, "Be my escape" started running through my head, even in the dream sequence .  So I did... Actually, it was pretty soft landing, back into reality, in my own bed, fully awake this time...  I almost just drifted back off to sleep, but then realized that this dream was much to strange and vivid, even if in a bad way for most of it, to simply go back to sleep on.  I started asking God to a) quiet my spirit, 'cause it was still racing like anything, and I really didn't wanna go back to sleep only to more bad dreams, and b) show me what on earth these dreams meant....  Here's what my thoughts on them are...

I think I had a glimpse into what many people in the world, but in Cornwall specifically, are feeling, except on a much smaller scale in my case.  

Man, where's a kleenex box when you need one?

But yeah...  There was a very decided emotion of fear in my dreams, and of desperation...  The realization of starting to follow the guy with the red hat down the stairs, after him showing me apparent friendship, and a lack of danger, and knowing that I had done that before, just....  Man, jolted me into fear....  Following him deeper and deeper into trust in him, before he turned on me and...  Killed me?  I guess?  And the desperation that followed, as I ran from there, as fast as I could, looked for a way of escape, but seeing absolutely nothing, was desperate enough for an escape that I just jumped, knowing that, even in a dream sequence, it sometimes at least seems to hurt.  

Just the jolt that shook my body while I followed the guy down the stairs, as I realized that I had done it before, naively trusting him again, and then attempting to escape, but seeing absolutely no way out of this building, feeling on trapped, knowing it was only a matter of time before both of the guys came and cornered me....  

Here are some of the explanations, according to this sheet, of "Red" and "Dog":

Red:

Anger, hatred, sin, zeal, war, bloodshed

Dog:

Warning, contagious evil, persecution, great danger, beware.

I feel like this is a warning...  LIke it's just....  Giving me a glimpse into what so many people in Cornwall and surronding area probably feel, except they feel it a million times worse and more concentrated.  First off, the friendliness from the red-hat dude could be compared with the "fun" that drugs or other similar substances seem to be.  The descent in the staircase could easily, based on my emotions in the dream, be compared to the spiraling downward that drugs or whatever causes...  Then came realization, which for some, doesn't come at all.  Desperation and utter hopelessness came next, which again is easily comparable.  So extreme is the hopelessness and desperation, that not only was I, in the dream, perfectly willing to toss myself out of a window to escape, I was also willing to, in a sense, "die" to the dream, which is pretty comparable to suicide, when an escape did not present itself readily.  So I jumped off a staircase.  

I really think this is just a warning, a peek into what people  go through, so that I, and anyone else who just read that whole thing, might have a better understanding of what people are going through.  An escape is the one thing that they need, and the only true and eternal escape is found in one word: Jesus.  We hold the ultimate escape, the remedy, the refuge and repair...  We are the ones who need to get out there and freely shine God's love to anyone and everyone, showing them how awesome God is and how much He loves them....  We need to save the hopeless, the desperate, and there's more than enough people like that hanging around....  We just need to start walking I think....

I know that was amazingly long... Really, I wonder how much of it made sense.... But I'm super tired, 'cause it's 1:45 AM...  But I really think that that dream meant something....  I think that interpretation is correct, at least to an extent, and more might be revealed later.  Laugh all you want, 'cause I probably would've too....  This was more for me, to organize thoughts

But to anyone who read all that, I say: thank you

I ought'a give ya a cookie....  

I think I'm going back to bed.... Thanks for reading what you did read....  God help us change this world and save people from desperation......