White as Snow

Yesterday morning I woke up and everything was white. We had had the kind of thick, wet snow that frosts the branches of trees and makes the drabness of winter beautiful again. The sight made me catch my breath. Then the pure white of the snow reminded me of a dream I had a year or more ago.

Considering I'm such a "deep," intropective person, my dreams are suprisingly benign. In fact, over the years I've kind of begged God for some sort of incredibly awesome, meaningful dream, or a "sign" in my dreams to help me through a difficult time. It just didn't happen. But over the past few years, I've had a couple of dreams that remained emblazened in my mind, dreams that I knew meant something important, even if I couldn't grasp the complete meaning right away.

In one, I was back in Springfield, on Sumner Ave., right near the old movie theater we used to catch $1 movies at. I looked down and saw a tornado barrelling down the street, about a mile away. Now, tornadoes are nothing new to my dreams. All of my life I've dreamed I was terrified and running from them. This dream was different. The tornado blasted down the road and I grabbed onto a slender tree nearby and held on for dear life. As the tornado went over there was nothing but wind and dark and terror and I could feel myself bending with the tree. But as quickly as it had came, after it went overhead the storm was gone, and, most bizarre -- the world had turned white. Somehow in its wake the tornado had left the world around me blanketed in snow. I don't remember there being any destruction left behind. Instead there was amazingly peaceful silence, and the pure white snow, sparkling in the sunshine. I remember being awed that I had survived and awed by the beauty of it all.

Since then the dream has stayed in my mind. And yesterday when the snow came I think I began to understand. Actually, the meaning came with the snow, my Bible study homework, and last night's Lost episode. An unlikely combination, I know. In the Bible study last week the lesson was all about our hearts being pure, and about the things we hold against God. I've known for awhile that I've held in what I feel is justifiable resentment and anger about many things in my life, both past and present. And we all know that holding onto those kinds of attitudes eats away at our insides. It's one thing to know and another to actually choose to let it go. So as I did that assignment, I found myself choosing to ask God to forgive me for letting things come between us. This is SO HARD to do when a part of me feels justified. But I keep looking around me. Unfairness is everywhere. Jamie should not have died. That guy at church that everyone prayed for should not have died and left his kids without a father. The guy in East Longmeadow, who lost his legs in Iraq and came home to rebuild his life, only to die in a car accident...evil is all around us. Death and sickness is all around us. Dwelling on the misery and unfairness of it all makes it all the worse.

Then, Lost las night, and this mysterious evil character that to me epitomizes the devil. Who knows what the final explanation will be, but that's how I see him. The thing that got me is that this character was not going and whispering in people's ears to steal, kill and destroy. Instead he was appealing to their sense of pride and anger and unanswered questions. "Why do you keep believing and following," he kept asking, "when no one ever tells you why certain things have happened? You DESERVE an explanation." And that reasoning drove certain characters to follow him...this quest to know, to finally understand.

And so back to the dream, the snow, the tornado. I think I know now that God was trying to tell me something. I think that autism is the storm. And if I hang onto Him for dear life, we will get through this, unscathed, but changed. The change is in me, in my soul. God truly does use our trials to perfect us. Or at least make us more like Him.

I can't tell you what a bad person I've been. Oh, not on the outside. I've been sweet and kind and unassuming and all of that, but since childhood, everything that happened to me didn't have the affect that it could have, on my heart. Instead of having more compassion on and reaching out to those who are disabled, different, or shunned, I ran from it all. I tried to wipe out any feelings of being "less" than anyone by all sorts of warped games...most of them involving comparing myself to other people and striving for "things" that might make me feel good. I strived for control, how to order my world and make it comfortable, inoffensive, and perfectly blended to everyone else in the land of surburbia. I've been in church all of my life and heard thousands of sermons but rarely took the effort to practically apply them, to really think about Jesus was saying and doing.

I'm not saying this to be down on myself and wallow; I just need to be blunt. These past few months have been miserable at times, and I've felt a hole in my heart so large that some days I physically feel an ache. But underneath it all is a truth, like the dream, that I am becoming the person I was always meant to be, that God always intended me to be. I don't mean to sound almost selfish here, because I know this isn't all about me, but I wonder: Can God use autism to make me well? Well in my soul, like the famous old song. There is nothing in life more valuable.