I thought I would put down on virtual paper a dream I had several years ago.  It was a remarkable dream to me, one that my husband and I are waiting on to fully come to life.

My husband and I were care givers in a home for young men. These young men, I had the impression, had shady backgrounds or inappropriate past lives.  They had been brought to this warehouse to be groomed as slaves. (It felt somewhat like a hospital, somewhat like an orphanage.  It looked very much like an airplane hangar.) Part of the grooming was a emasculating process where they were wrapped in full body plaster casts.  (In my dream it reminded me of the practice of feet binding on young Chinese girls, in ages past, to keep their feet small and delicate.) The men in their casts were lined up, on mats on the floor, row after row.  There were likely some 30 or 40 young men.

So these young men were bound to keep them small and feminine in stature and build.  Our job was simply to feed them and give them drink through the opening that was left for their mouths. 

In my dream, as we were tending to the young men my husband finally snapped.  He began weeping and said "I can't take this anymore" and he at once began picking up these young men in their casts and, wrapping his arms around them as if to hug them, squeezed them until their casts broke off.  One by one, he picked up the boys freeing them from their casts, giving them the opportunity to develop into who they were meant to be.

We have been praying about this dream for some time now, and we feel we have several ways of understanding what the Lord intended us to learn by it.  My husband's occupation lends him opportunities to work with young men with troubled backgrounds, and in part we feel that may be a meaning to the dream.  Still we feel there is more.

I share this for many reasons but one stands out to me right now as I type.  The Lord created each of us with a specific end in mind.  He has a plan to use us for His glory using the gifts He's given us.  Many of us (dare I say all) have to some extent let ourselves be put into a cast (or have put it on ourselves) so that we are limited from being the person He fully intends us to be.  May we seek the Lord earnestly for the freedom and release to be willing to go to the places He calls us, and to be willing to do the things He shows us.