The Chairs Of Agreement

 My recurring dreams are about houses. Never my own houses. Ones I’ve coveted, one I want to own and to change, ones I have vision for, but aren’t mine to affect. This time the house belonged to my Aunt and Uncle. They were running it like a bnb, but they were leaving, and I was confused whether I was supposed to be hosted or do the hosting. Lots of confusion, muddy driveways, people coming and going, not knowing who was taking care of anyone or anything, not knowing my place, wishing things would or could be different, but unable to affect  any change. Everybody was going to a movie, but I didn’t want to see the movie. I wanted to be useful around the house, so I was trying to clean, and I was messing with snack boards, and trying to make food, but nothing was how I would do it. It was all just awkward. Dirty dish water and crumbling cheese and chaos.

In my house dreams there is often a room like the master bedroom, it’s always hidden, and ALWAYS has something wrong with it. Like it has all this potential, usually has a hot tub, and vaulted ceilings in my dreams, but there’s always something dysfunctional happening. Sometimes heaps and heaps of dirty laundry, sometimes it’s connected to a public bathroom or school gym bathroom with rusty stalls or broken pipes. This time it had a colossal houseplant in the corner, growing out of a landscaped little river stone lined bed right in the floor, and up through designated cutaways in every floor of the house, all the way to the very top floor. I knew it was a very extraordinary thing, prized and renowned, but the plant looked wicked, and I knew it was a liability. It looked like the “Rumor Weed” from Veggie Tales, it had a pointed, defined mouth with lips. It looked sickly, the color looked wrong, like it was dying, but there was work being done to keep it alive, and it had been tied to the wall to keep it upright. The “mouth” had gone slack, and it was looking more and more transparent and slimy by the minute, like it had been frozen. I knew that if it were to collapse, the rot would spill into all of the lower levels of the house and make a toxic mess so big that the lower levels would have to be totally gutted and then remodeled.

I was running around the house still in confusion, and trying to figure out my place when I found my Uncle John up in the upper room. It was the topmost floor of the house, it had a fireplace, and a beautiful old unvarnished wooden floor, but the walls and ceiling had been recently redone with updated lighting to accentuate the artwork. In place of windows, Johnny had commissioned the art on the walls, a surrounding city scape of simple buildings with cut out 4 paneled windows, and made out of pottery glazed in purplish blue and burnished burgundies. It was set into the stucco of the walls, and actually baked in place. Johnny said it was tricky to bake them, but he was pleased. I understood that the images in the walls were intercessory, representing the Church around the world. Everything in the room was huge, except for this weird knobby little stool that was in every way opposite to the rest of the chairs, except that it was made out of wood. I wondered if it was a kneeling chair. There was something indecent and tortuous about it. The other chairs were HUGE, wooden, also, but HUGE. They were practical and proportionate for human legs, sittable, and beautifully, humbly wooden, but they had these enormous grandiose chair backs. The backs of the chairs were elongated hollow loops or circles, like a see-through spoon. They would frame any occupant with an ascendant glowing wooden halo. The chairs were beautiful and simple, just HUGE. And I thought how unlike Johnny it was to be inhabiting that place with the kingly chairs. Johnny was pacing the floor, but he invited me to sit in one of the chairs. I didn’t want to sit in the chairs because I didn’t feel like I deserved to, and I didn’t think anybody ought to glorify themselves like that. I was also distracted by the plant I could see just poking up out of the corner where the floor was cut away... But I remembered they got their house from Grampa Will, so it was designed by and for previous generations. I heard “King Arthur’s chairs,” “The Chairs of the Round Table,” and “The Chairs Of Agreement.” 

Those of us with hearts of intercession for the “houses,” the Church, are invited to sit there in that upper room in those chairs and to come together in agreement. I think I was supposed to have sat in the chair. If I had, then Johnny would have taken his rightful place in his chair. The indecent stool was the embodiment of the self gratification of false humility, and it was the ONLY other option to the big chairs. The plant had no power or influence over the atmosphere of the upper room, it was barely tall enough to come up through the floor. The only way that it had any effect at all was in holding my attention, but as soon as I decided to ignore it, it may as well not even have been there. Since there was no natural light in the room, the plant couldn’t and wouldn’t grow up into the room. It’s time for us to recognize the power of our attention... our attention is our worship. And it’s time to lose the pride of assumed humility, it’s time to take our rightful and assigned seats of authority and agreement. This is a time and place of conception and bringing to light.

Interestingly, this dream was totally horizontal, in it, He is not concerned with our relationship to Him, or in Him, this comes after that has been established in us. The focal point here was strictly on our posture relating to eachother, and on how that posture affects our standing and authority in the world.