“But the Lord stood at my side and gave me the strength, so that through me the message might be fully proclaimed and all the Gentiles might hear it.  And I was delivered from the lion’s mouth.”(2 Timothy 4:17 (New International Version)

I heard this passage for the first time approximately four years after that dream…

When I heard the Bible verse, 2 Timothy 4:17 spoken on the podcast that day, my heart felt as if it completely stopped and everything in time and space seemed to freeze for moments.

I knew this was for me. I had heard of God giving people “life verses” before and instantly in that moment, I knew this was mine. 

I think these precious words came over me that day, so many years after my dream because my heart was finally healed enough to receive this verse for my life. 

I’m not sure how to explain this other than to simply say that God can speak to us through dreams.  The dream is “different” in a way that is difficult to explain, but one thing I can promise is you will recognize it to be different than a normal dream and your memory will hold on to it, letting it come up in your thoughts often and with a distinct feeling encompassing it.

The Lion Dream:

At the very start of the dream, I found myself panicky, standing nearly waist-deep in water with my very young daughters on each side of me. The water appeared to be rising higher by the second.  Hurriedly, I looked around to find an escape.  My eyes were drawn behind me first, only to see a tall landscape of a brownish-red rock wall encircling the entirety of the natural pool of water we were in.  The walls were half a mile’s swim to get to, and even if I could somehow swim both girls to the walls, they were smooth with no footing to climb them.  No possibility of escape.

My desperate eyes then quickly looked straight ahead.  I noticed a sandy beach with the same earthy wall behind it, but this beach was closer, probably only 20 swimming arm-stokes in front of us.

For a quick instant, I began to move toward the shoreline. 

But then, a roaring lion appeared on the beach.

His gaze was right upon us and his ferocious prowl was moving in our direction.  I knew he was on his way into the water to take our lives.

There was truly no way out.

With complete despair and complete surrender, I wrapped one arm as tightly as I could around each of my daughters as we shut our eyes and put our heads down in defeat.  Our death was inevitable.

Then, we waited.

And waited.

And waited.

Moments later in the dream, I saw myself in a completely different setting.  I was running around an outdoor marketplace in what seemed to be a foreign country, but the faces in the market felt familiar.  I was jubilantly screaming at the top of my lungs that God had saved us from that lion!  I couldn’t do anything but run with full force to let everyone who could hear me know He had saved us.  My feeling of gratitude and excitement of being saved from that lion were so overwhelming, I couldn’t help but desire for everyone to hear about Him and what he had done for me.

I clung to this dream often for years to come.  During my trials and darkest moments, that dream would come to the forefront of my mind and managed to somehow remind my innermost being, that God saw me and was with me.

Pretty incomprehensible, that the MAKER of the Universe knew me and reached out to me in a dream, right?

Even so, it is true.

It’s also true that even though this impacted my life so greatly, it still took me a while to be restored to Him.  I was still in a dark place of grief when I had that dream, but he gave me the strength and the desire to move forward in small steps. 

With slow, but intentional perseverance, I began to seek to understand the Bible and who Jesus is.  I began to connect with people who already knew Him.  I began to surrender my life to him, by asking for his guidance and living according to what I had been learning through his word.

He re-introduced himself to me in a new way and has helped me learn to live a more fulfilling life that savors real riches like joy and peace, that can truly only be found through Him. 

Most importantly of all, I realized what He saved me from.  A life of eternal darkness, separate from Him.

Today, if you find yourself in this very marketplace, hear my voice.

“God saved me and He will save you, too.”