In 2005, right after my husband died suddenly, I had a dream. A terrible dream..

I dreamed I was doing a report for someone on a local church. Several people were given a church to do the report on and mine sits on a highway that has an access road directly in front of the church. The church is very large with 4 doors leading inside. In my dream though there were two large doors that opened up like barn doors. Otherwise the church looked exactly like the real church in my city. It is brick and wood. The wood part is painted white, the brick is the typical red brick.

I was given a chair to sit in and told my job that day was to simply watch the church. The chair was extremely high, like a lifeguard would use. I was told to place the chair across the 4 lane highway in a grassy spot that was directly in front of the "barn like doors." The placement of the chair seemed to me to be very important. As though it had to be just right so I wouldn't miss a single event.

I sat in that spot for several hours before anything happened. The traffic was unusually light which was a surprise since the highway is a very busy highway. Suddenly to my right and so far away I couldn't make out what I was seeing, I saw a mist like object floating just above the highway. It never got as low as the highway to touch it but still pretty low. For what seemed like an hour this "mist" was to far away to see clearly but then it crept closer and closer until I could tell that it wasn't a mist at all but sand.Now I live in Missouri and we don't have sand storms here but this was like a sand storm. As the cloud of sand got closer I could tell it was blowing really really hard yet it stayed in an organized pattern coming straight up the highway. I started getting edgy and a feeling crept over me that this wasn't going to be good and I felt tears forming in my eyes. Tears from a real sadness started sweeping all over me. I didn't understand why I wanted to cry ! but knew I was going to.

The sand kept coming straight down the highway until it got directly in front of the church doors where it suddenly stopped moving and just hovered there. Suddenly the church doors blew open and I could see clearly inside the church. I could see all the way to the baptismal.I could see the pews were filled but... the pews were not filled with people, but plants. There were large plants, medium size plants and I could even see small plants and even starter size plants on the seats. There was an incredibly large plant at the podium where the minister would stand. On the outside of the church thew sand whipped into a fury and beat against the building so hard that I could see the paint peeling off the wooden parts of the church and bricks were falling and crashing to the ground.This fury lasted until there were no paint or bricks left and the building was shown to be horribly ugly. Looking nothing like it had before.

On the inside for maybe an hour the plants were exposed as just that but then the sand storm moved inside the church. The horrible fury of the sand obliterated almost everything inside. The plant at the podium was left bare and ugly. Just a small potion of it was left. It was so broken and stripped of the beauty it had once held that if it had not been where it was I would not have even guessed it was the same plant. Over three quarters of the large plants had disappeared completely and the few that were still there were shocking in their ugliness. The medium plants were few and far between. The small plants and starter plants were left untouched even though the sand was even whipping up the carpets it still left the small and starter plants untouched.

The sand lifted back into a uniform pattern suddenly and left the church. It was strange that once outside the church the sand disappeared. I sat in that tall chair and watched this horrible event not understanding but yet knowing that I did understand. What was left of that church was beyond shocking. It left an exposed and ugly scene in the wake of the sand storm. The sand storm had shown what was underneath the beautiful facade. There was a message in that dream yet the shock of what happened was so great that it took several months for me to actually understand.