I never quite know what to make of dreams. They so often seem like nonsensical or fantastical composites of images from our lives or imaginings, and yet I'm reluctant to say they are meaningless. God made us to dream. I just don't know why. But it's at least worth asking what true or good thing can come of a dream.

I'm standing in my church around the communion table with several other men, all of whom seem familiar to me. A twenty-ish looking young guy is actually serving us communion. When I see him I immediatley know who he is. It's Jim Morrision, former lead singer of The Doors. I'm wondering how on earth I can be celebrating communion with Jim Morrision, a man known for a life style of excess, who died of a drug overdose. Then the scene changes. I'm the driver in a car with the same men pulling up to the front gate of Camp Lejeune Marine Corps Base. Beside me? Jim Morrison. Once again I'm wondering what we are doing and then how long we will spend in the brig when Morrison's drugs are discovered. Then I woke up, smiling.

I don't know what this means, if anything, but I do know that it prompts me to think that there will be some surprises for us in Heaven. Maybe Jim Morrrison made it, though his life demonstrated little fruit of it, as "one escaping through the flames" (1 Cor. 3:15). It's humbling to know that as I look around me in church, or in a crowded restaurant, that any judgment I make about the state of a person's soul is entirely provisional. In a real sense the Church --- those true believers, the ones only God knows --- is invisible to me. In the local church body, for example, there are times when we are called upon to make such provisional judgmemts about a person's spiritual walk. In determining whether to accept someone as a member, we seek to determine if they have a profession of Christian faith, to know as best we can that this person understands and accepts the Gospel. Despite our best efforts to divine their spiritual bent, we may and sometimes will get it wrong.

We get it wrong outside the church body as well. In the larger world around me, someone may believe and yet not be able to profess their belief as yet, not be able to vocalize what deep down they already believe. That is why some communions --- most Reformed denominations --- speak of the visible church and the invisible church, the prior being what appears to be the Church, the latter, what only God sees to be the true believers. One example rings true to me, even 15 years later (or more). A Polish woman gave a testimony of faith in our church. She was a member of Solidarity who escaped Communist Poland. In a refugee camp in Austria, she heard the Gospel for the first time and believed. What she said was that when she heard the Gospel story she knew that "this is what I have always believed." She knew something was broken about life and she knew that there had to be a Savior-King, though she could not articulate that.

"Smiles mixed with curses" says Bruce Cockburn, and yet there are "rumours of glory" out there in the world and in here in the church. When Jim Morrison sings "Riders on the Storm" I hear nothing but curses, as he says "into this house we're born/ into this world we're thrown/ like a dog without a bone/ and actor out of role." And yet there I am having communion with Jim Morrison. Could it be? I think maybe I better be humble about who's in and who's out. God only knows.