Hello, this is Dave Scherrer of One Hundred-Fold Ministries and you have found Kingdom Offerings, and this is the home of our podcasts. And I want to say thanks for checking in, but I also want to give a shameless plug for the blog environment of One Hundred-Fold Ministries that we call “Backyard Conversations”.

At Backyard Conversations, you will find some short thoughts, some easy conversation like you might find around a barbecue lunch at a spring backyard party. It’s just that the conversations all center around Jesus and not sports or politics or the economy or the latest phone that Apple puts out. It’s not that I don’t have those kind of conversations all the time. It’s just that the conversations about Jesus and His kingdom coming usually don’t get much play.

Maybe an hour on Sunday, but even then we spend a lot of the time in the hallways of church discussing sports, politics, and the latest phone. I find that kind of weird really. I’m saying all of this because I want to talk about how it is when it becomes difficult or even impossible to distinguish between truth and lie.

As I stated in my last blog at Backyard Conversations entitled “It’s a Wonderful Life,” the world is lying to us all the time. It is erasing true truths (with capital T’s), true truths of a divine nature, and it’s replacing those truths with half-truths and bold-faced lies. Eventually, the listener cannot distinguish between the two.

Politicians and propagandists have been living under the banner of this reality manipulation for a long time. So before you listen much further to this podcast, you might want to go to our website homepage and track down that blog at 100foldministries.org. It will help to frame our topic for this podcast. But, if you just want to listen, I think our topic will become pretty clear by the end, so hang with me.

So this is a true story. My wife Susan recently suffered a difficult fall and broke her hip. In fact, she came home from the hospital where she underwent surgery, and following that, at a stay in the rehab learned how to walk again, and that was just yesterday. The surgery was successful, but the trauma of the fall, the anesthetic for the surgery, the follow-up pain medications, took a toll on Susan’s mind.

For several days, she had vivid dreams and deep confusion over her surroundings, memory loss regarding her fall and surgery. This delirium is sometimes called “hospital-induced delirium”. You can check it out. It’s found online. You can see it at the National Institute of Health if you want to look it up. It’s a thing, hospital-induced delirium. So to cut to the chase, Susan had very vivid and concerning dreams in the days following her surgery.

One very real dream was that she had been kidnapped and that she had been hidden in the cargo area of a plane, and she was terrified. Now, initially, I was not aware of this dream, only that Susan wanted out, wanted out of this room and out of this circumstance, big time. Every 45 seconds for three days and three nights, it was, “David, get me out of this room…take me home.” That was followed by me saying, “I love you. I’m staying with you all day and all night. You are safe. You have had a bad fall, and you’ve had surgery to repair a broken leg. We will be able to leave soon when you are better.” And that would be followed by her saying, “Yes, I understand what you’re saying, but you have to help me get up and get out of here.” And this went over and over and over.

She became deeply frustrated and angry with me. She stopped taking her medications for fear of being poisoned.

I tried to reason with her, “Susan, these are the same medications you take from home”, to which she would reply, “How do I know that? They aren’t from my pill bottles.”

“Trust me,” I would plead. You need these pills to prevent your transplanted kidney from rejecting.”  

And her response staggered me. “I don’t trust you, and that is just the risk I will have to take.”

Now, remember at this point in the process, I was not aware of her dreams and her abiding terror. In her reality, she could not understand how it could be that her usually caring husband, for almost 50 years of marriage, was not willing to come to her aid. Her conclusion was that I must not actually be her husband but was part of this kidnapping conspiracy. Her real David would never treat her like this.

So now, two weeks removed, we can laugh about it a little bit. But in that moment, in our lack of sleep and in pain of heart and body, it was a tremendous test of our relationship.

Okay, I told you that very current story from my life, not to make you feel sorry for me, but to make a point about the lies of the world.

You see, Susan’s experience with hospital-induced dementia is a little bit like our lives in this lying world. Susan had these very vivid but false beliefs, floating around in her brain. Added to the dreams was the world as she was seeing it. The real world, the hospital room and the medical care around her, and the dream world became one confused, troubling world.

As much as I, the loving husband, standing above her bed, declaring my love, and telling her the truth that she is safe in my care, and that I’m trying to make her comfortable, she would have none of it. The lies and the false dreams were too persuasive and too vivid. The truths seemed true, but not true enough.

Eventually, even me, her husband, was drawn into the conspiracy. In her mind, she could not comprehend why her loving husband would not help her. I imagine it must have gone in her mind something like, “David, just pull up the car and help me walk out and let’s go home. You say you love me, and you have the ability to help me, but you won’t. I don’t believe in you anymore.”

It seems so simple to her, an easy fix out of her desperate circumstances. So now, maybe in this story, you’re seeing some spiritual similarities that we all face down here in our world. Us living in a world of lies while our sacrificing and loving God is standing above us, whispering truths to us.

We try to make sense of the vivid but false dreams, false narratives that we live in day-to-day, but the truths seem elusive, even fantastical. How our God loves us and how deceived we are, to the point where we now imagine God to be the co-conspirator in the drama. We quit believing in the very source of truth and love itself.

One last thought for today. I want you to imagine, too, the frustration and heartache of our loving and Heavenly Father, who patiently tells us the truth over and over and over, that we are loved, and that we are safe, and that He is with us always, until finally, the false dreams become less real, and the truth of His love and protection sinks in, and then our lives are transformed by the renewing of our minds.

This is Dave Scherrer. I’m the president and founder of One Hundred-Fold Ministries, and I want you to never forget the blessings of the gospel of the kingdom, which are bigger than you can imagine, not just thirty-fold, not even just sixty-fold, but a hundred-fold and even more. Blessings set aside for you in the kingdom of God. Peace to you.

And here’s to a blessed New Year in the name of the King of Kings. Take care.