Quis ut Deus?
“Heal me, O Lord, and I shall be healed;
Jeremiah 17:14
save me, and I shall be saved,
for you are my praise.”
This is the Bible verse that my daily Bible app delivered to me the morning after I had a particularly disturbing nightmare. While I knew then and now that everything that happened was only in my mind and not part of reality, that didn’t change the horror for me. To summarize, I had a hideous nightmare that the Devil, invisible to my eyes in the dream, tried to assault me in very personal physical ways that left me shuddering for a good 10 minutes when I woke up.
I felt defiled, and that sense of defilement carried over into a much more peaceful dream, where I was tasked to gently clean a Lourdes-style statuette of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Because the terror and revilement of the nightmare were still fresh, I felt too dirty to even touch her statuette. Even though I was certain I could hear God pleading to me to understand that what happened in the nightmare wasn’t my fault, I didn’t feel ok placing my hands on the image of the Virgin Mary.
Then, I later saw this quote as my daily verse. The theme fit right into what I needed: divine healing. It’s something that I feel God heaps on me the instant I wake up from bad dreams because He knows how freaked out these nightmares of mine can leave me. Without God’s healing touch, I’d still be scarred from these nightmares of mine. For His ceaseless work at ensuring that these dreams of mine can’t weigh me down, I’m grateful.
Above all, this verse from Jeremiah is a stark reminder to myself that it’s folly for me to believe that I can somehow heal myself from the horror of these dreams without any help. God’s made it clear to me time and time again that He’s the only one who can truly get rid of that trauma, and I can’t forget this important truth.
Featured Image by Connor Brennan
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