A Dream Image and Ultimate Insanity.

I'm dreaming every night, but I'm not remembering them. I not troubled by this. The usual nature of my dreaming, or what I can recall, are flights of movement and action and color and never any specifics. I remember only that some craziness happened - like the incoherent snippets of memory after getting clocked in a street fight. I know my spirit and the Holy Spirit are going on grand adventures, happy to run along without conscious-me tagging along. So conscious-me doesn't need to remember. The deepest parts of me are getting massaged and grown and stretched and pacified and purified while the rest of me is at rest. I'll take it.

Yesterday, Carl led an in-depth college-level-survey-seminar of all-things-dreams on GroupMe. He convinced me, at least, that I should pursue some divine knowledge while sleeping. So I prayed  yesterday:
God, I ask You for a dream tonight, one that provides clear direction from You.

Annnd, last night I had a dream. More like echoes of a dream, like usual. But, there among the confetti snippets of dream memory, I did hold to one very complete, razor-sharp and memorable image.
Since the dream isn't much of a story to tell, let me tell you a different story first.

Familiar with Dave's Insanity Sauce? The hot sauce that can remove driveway grease stains? I first tasted it after I came home from Thailand, when my mouth was conditioned into a spicy-food resistance that could lick a red-hot tailpipe and giggle.
We were in a hot-sauces-only store, I was going to buy a bottle of something crazy for my father in law who liked hot sauce, and I asked what was hottest. The retailer said Dave's Ultimate Insanity sauce.
I asked for a trial. The guy dipped a toothpick into the bottle and handed it over. I touched it to my tongue. I remember wondering if I had speared myself with the tip of the toothpick, because this slightest hint of Dave's had created a tiny black hole that was sucking all the loose shards of pain from all points in the universe directly into my tongue meat. 

Fast forward to after I'd gifted the bottle to my father in law, when we're making sandwiches and joking about putting some Dave's onto the sandwiches, and his mother says she wants to try the stuff.

Gram was the sweetest person in all of the Body of Christ. Jesus would shed tears at times hoping that He could have a heart of love like her someday. Never an unkind word, never any talk that didn't somehow cycle back to Godliness or a blessing or some manner of self-sacrifice. She's about 70, and slowing down physically, but still ramping up in her divine sweetness - until the world will not be worthy of it anymore and she is taken home.

Just trying to give you a mental picture if you never met her. We all know someone like her: the one upon whose prayers the entire church stands. When she dies, if someone doesn't step up their game, the church will close its doors, because all the love will have left the building.

She wants to try the hot sauce, and, not seeing too well anymore, she smacks the bottom of the bottle like ketchup and blops at least a quarter-sized ball of lava onto her sandwich.

Everyone: Whoa! Stop! Danger! Don't do that Gram! This stuff isn't like that! You're going to have a heart attack! It's going to eat a hole through you and down to China!
Gram: Oh, stop it, sweetie. Blop, blop.

This conversation goes in a circle for 5 minutes until Gram voices a grim edge to her sweetness and we all know that it's time to surrender. She is going to do this thing, and telling her not to is only hardening her resolution to add more sauce.

This was before a universal 911 phone number was instituted and people had to call emergency services by their particular phone number, so I go into the kitchen and ready her a post-tastebud-meltdown glass of milk, and check that the number for the ambulance service is magnetized to the refrigerator. I know what one toothpick tip of this stuff is capable of. She is liable to have that heart attack. 

I bring the milk back to the table in time to see her take the first bite. Gram, with grim resolve, remains immobile as she eats that whole sandwich.
  
She can't see. Her eyes cloud over into a drippy bloodshot pink. Basins of sweat pool in the folds under her eyes. She cannot speak. She will not speak, I think, even if she can, since if she might emit a squeak, the sound would be an indictment: I have misstepped and I must admit it.

This kindly elderly lady is suddenly someone monstrously grand in my eyes. A towering cliff that withstands crashing ocean waves for centuries and remains intact. A sun that burns, and is burned, for millennia and never flames out. What is her secret?

Stubbornness. And it's not hers only, this dark power. 
I look around the table, and there to my right is my little brother in law, who, at the age of 10 ordered a raw steak at a restaurant. Who knows why. Maybe being the guy who eats bloody meat sounded manly at that time to him. The plate came to the table, red and bleeding juice and still mooing as they say, and, rather than return the cut to be cooked, he mechanically chewed through the whole disgusting thing, obviously hating every second, but too stubborn to admit it.
And, on my left. There is my father in law, who I won't tell any tales on, as he is in heaven now and has the ear of the Almighty, and who, while alive, was famous for harboring no quit at all, ever, and who, like Gram, was the most loving and generous and self-denying man alive, but who was notoriously the stubborn-est of them all.

He's more stubborn than Gram, who is sweating but resolute and unmoved and upright, but only just so, holding herself together like some sort of human jellocake. If I were to touch her with my pinky finger, I think she might start to jiggle and vibrate and volcanically explode.

But she doesn't. Through sheer stubbornness she didn't. And she never admitted that the sandwich was hot. She never said anything, no matter how anyone tried to tease any commentary on the experience out of her. 

And I learned: I am married into a family with monumental resolve founded on a granite foundation of stubbornness. Stubbornness that will swallow burning pitch without flinching to avoid an admission of misjudgement. Stubbornness that can turn a Godly grandma into a stoic deathbot, incapable of acknowledging pain.
And I realized: Her stubborn blood also runs in the veins of my wife; the woman with access to my bank account and the block of knives in our kitchen.

You're making a big scary deal out of not much, you say. Stubbornness! Everybody is a donkey sometimes. This only becomes a problem during communication and conflict. It's not a spiritual issue, stubbornness, is it? It's not really an evil to beware? 

I don't know: Can anyone tell you anything? Can anyone question you on anything, or call you on anything? Do you always have to be in the driver's seat during any disagreement? Can you listen to more than a few sentences of anyone's anything before you drift or interrupt or contradict? Do you always have to be right? Can you ever say you're sorry? Can you ever be wrong? Can you ever admit that you might have misstepped into a pool of hot sauce?

Yeah, hot sauce. Which, brings me back to my dream. I have my usual dream(s) last night. I say "usual," but I don't know what the content is in my usual dreams.
What I do remember is a picture-framed dream portrait of Gram, my father in law, my wife, my brother in law - the whole surnamed family line - as static busts in a museum display. I have only that picture and the encompassing mist of dream-knowledge that all of these people are held by a spirit of Stubbornness. 

A spirit of stubborn? It's not even a thing, is it? The One talking to me via a dream says yes. And a generational, familial one that that. The Stubborns.

I woke up holding tight to this image and didn't waste any time. I prayed. I first prayed my gratitude to God, for answering my request to speak to me clearly and directly during dreaming, and then spoke to the spirit of Stubbornness down through the whole familial line, down through my kids, breaking it and replacing stubbornness with humility, receptivity, openness. Soft heartedness instead of hard headedness. Some tractability where there's been intractabilty.

That was this morning. This evening, L and H are having a disagreement, after everyone else has carted off to bed. The words were indistinct, but the tones of the voices made the messaging clear: 
I'm stubbornly stubborning your stubborn stubbornnesses, and I've stubborned enough stubbornnessing for one stubborn day!
Well, my stubborn stubborny can't take any more stubbornite from the avalanche of stubborn flying down from your stubbornstubbornstubborn stubborn range!

How do two stubborn people back down to show love when Stubbornness is a brushfire on their tongues? This will be a spiritual war that one prayer isn't going to win, I see. I'm glad that I was given a dream image to prep me for what's at stake, and to ready me a sledgehammer of Humility to smash against this long-standing red-hot iron-willed wall of Stubbornness.