Crossing the Betrayal Barrier

In 1993, I had a spiritual dream that has stayed with me for more than three decades.

I have shared portions of it periodically through the years.

What follows is my attempt to tell the experience as faithfully as I can remember it.

I also want to make an important distinction at the outset. Some of what I will describe is what I actually saw and heard in the dream in 1993. Other observations are things I have come to understand as I have pondered the dream and lived with God during the thirty-three years since.

I don’t want to confuse the two.

The dream came first.

The interpretation has continued unfolding.

And, strangely enough, there are dimensions of this dream that make more sense to me now than they possibly could have in 1993.

The dream began with a baseball player.

I saw him standing at the plate, swinging at a baseball.

He swung.

Missed.

He swung again.

Missed again.

Strike after strike.

Then I heard the Lord say:

“My people are on strike, and they are striking out.”

It was a play on words, but there was nothing playful about its meaning.

I understood that these were people who had become deeply discouraged in their relationship with God.

They had tried.

They had believed.

They had prayed.

They had served.

They had sacrificed.

They had swung the bat again and again.

But they seemed to keep missing.

Eventually some had simply stopped swinging.

They had gone “on strike.”

There was something in their hearts that said:

“This isn’t what I signed up for.”

And then came another statement that has remained with me through the years:

“Tell them they are lonely. Tell them they are lonely for Me.”

That struck deeply.

Their anger was not merely anger.

Their disappointment was not merely disappointment.

Underneath it was loneliness for God.

They had wanted Him.

They had wanted His presence, His kingdom, His promises, His purposes. They had believed things about what He would do in their lives.

But somewhere along the journey, the story had taken a turn they had not anticipated.

The distance between what they believed God had promised and what they were actually experiencing had become painful.

Then the first scroll appeared.

The first scroll was Isaiah 49.

The passage describes a servant called by God from the womb:

“The LORD called me from the womb, from the body of my mother he named my name. He made my mouth like a sharp sword; in the shadow of his hand he hid me; he made me a polished arrow; in his quiver he hid me away.”— Isaiah 49:1–2

The imagery is striking.

God makes the servant’s mouth into a sharp sword.

And then He hides him.

God makes the servant into a polished arrow.

And then He puts the arrow into His quiver.

Even now, I find that image almost painfully evocative.

Why sharpen a sword only to hide it?

Why polish an arrow if you are not going to shoot it?

Why spend years preparing someone for a purpose and then permit that person to enter a season in which all the preparation appears useless?

Eventually the servant reaches a devastating conclusion:

“But I said, ‘I have labored in vain; I have spent my strength for nothing and vanity…’”— Isaiah 49:4

I have labored in vain.

Those words have become more meaningful to me as the years have passed.

This isn’t the complaint of someone who refused to work.

The servant labored.

This isn’t someone who withheld himself.

He spent his strength.

He poured himself into what he believed God had called him to do.

And then he looked at the apparent result and said:

Nothing came of it.

That is a very particular kind of pain.

It is one thing to suffer because we have been foolish.

It is another thing to suffer while believing we have been obedient.

Perhaps you know something about this.

You believed God concerning a ministry.

A marriage.

A child.

A friendship.

A church.

A vocation.

A healing.

A dream.

A prophetic promise.

You didn’t merely fantasize about it.

You invested your life in it.

You prayed.

You waited.

You sacrificed.

And eventually you found yourself staring at circumstances that appeared to say:

It was all for nothing.

But the servant’s sentence does not end there.

There is a hinge in Isaiah 49:4:

“Yet surely my right is with the LORD, and my recompense with my God.”— Isaiah 49:4

Yet surely.

Those two words would become extremely important.

But the dream wasn’t finished.

Another scroll appeared.

The second scroll was Isaiah 28.

I saw a man inside a dilapidated shack.

He was crouched there, sheltering himself inside this structure as though it could protect him.

Then the weather became violent.

Hail began pounding the shack.

Water came pouring through.

The shelter was failing.

The very thing the man had chosen as a place of refuge was proving incapable of protecting him.

I understood the shack to represent what Isaiah calls a “refuge of lies.”

Isaiah says:

“We have made lies our refuge, and in falsehood we have taken shelter.”— Isaiah 28:15

This part of the dream has become clearer to me over the years.

The man was not simply a foolish person who happened to believe incorrect ideas.

He gravitated toward the refuge of lies because of his sense of divine betrayal.

That distinction matters.

The shack offered him something.

Protection.

An explanation.

A way of making sense of his disappointment.

Perhaps even a way of protecting himself from hoping again.

This is one of the places where my later reflection begins to mingle with the original imagery.

Why do wounded people sometimes take refuge in lies?

Because sometimes a lie feels safer than hope.

When something we believed God promised collapses, we search for explanations.

Maybe God never called me.

Maybe I imagined everything.

Maybe prayer doesn’t really matter.

Maybe those prophetic words were nonsense.

Maybe nothing supernatural ever happened.

Maybe God doesn’t really intervene.

Maybe He has abandoned me.

Maybe I was simply naïve.

Those interpretations can become a shack.

They do not necessarily arise from rebellion.

Sometimes they arise from pain.

If I stop expecting anything from God, perhaps God cannot disappoint me again.

But a refuge built from a lie cannot ultimately shelter us.

Isaiah continues:

“Therefore thus says the Lord GOD,‘ Behold, I am the one who has laid as a foundation in Zion, a stone, a tested stone, a precious cornerstone, of a sure foundation…’”— Isaiah 28:16

And then:

“And hail will sweep away the refuge of lies,and waters will overwhelm the shelter.”— Isaiah 28:17

That is exactly what I saw.

The hail came.

The waters came.

The shack could not survive.

Looking back, I see something important here.

What initially looks like destruction can actually be mercy.

God was not destroying the man.

He was destroying the shelter that could never save him.

The shack had to go.

The person did not.

The refuge of lies collapsed.

The Cornerstone remained.

Then the third scroll appeared.

The third scroll was Isaiah 26.

This time the imagery was childbirth.

Isaiah says:

“Like a pregnant woman who writhes and cries out in her pangs when she is near to giving birth, so were we because of you, O LORD; we were pregnant, we writhed, but we have given birth to wind.”— Isaiah 26:17–18

That may be one of Scripture’s most visceral pictures of disappointed expectation.

Pregnancy carries promise.

Something has been conceived.

Something is growing.

You carry it.

You make room for it.

You protect it.

You wait for it.

Then labor begins.

The pain itself seems to announce:

Something is about to be born.

Surely this travail means the promise is arriving.

Surely all this pain is going somewhere.

Surely after carrying this for so long, there will finally be something we can hold.

And then—

wind.

Nothing tangible.

Nothing resembling what we expected.

Nothing we can hold in our arms and say:

There. That is what all the suffering was for.

By this point, the three scrolls were telling a single story.

Isaiah 49: a polished arrow hidden in a quiver.

Isaiah 28: a wounded person hiding in a refuge of lies.

Isaiah 26: a pregnant person laboring intensely and giving birth to wind.

Calling.

Disappointment.

Disillusionment.

And then the dream moved to the shoreline.

I found myself standing with the Lord on a beach.

We were looking out over the ocean.

Then the Lord drew a line in the sand.

And He said:

“This is the betrayal barrier.”

Those words have stayed with me since 1993.

I understood that there comes a point in some journeys with God when ordinary disappointment becomes something deeper.

We are no longer merely disappointed with circumstances.

We are no longer merely disappointed with people.

Or churches.

Or leaders.

Or ourselves.

A frightening thought begins to surface:

I feel betrayed by God.

I choose those words carefully.

The dream was describing a sense of divine betrayal, not declaring that God is actually a betrayer.

Those are radically different things.

God is faithful.

But there are moments when His faithfulness can become extraordinarily difficult for us to reconcile with our experience.

We believed Him.

We trusted Him.

Perhaps we believed we heard Him.

And what happened seemed to contradict what we believed He had said.

That is the betrayal barrier.

And when a person reaches it, another encouraging word can sometimes feel almost cruel.

Please don’t tell me again what God is going to do.

I’ve heard it before.

I’ve believed it before.

I’ve organized my life around it before.

I’ve waited before.

I don’t know whether I can afford to hope again.

And that brings us back to Isaiah 49.

The servant had said:

“I have labored in vain;I have spent my strength for nothing and vanity…”

That is honest lament.

He does not sanitize his disappointment.

He does not pretend that everything turned out beautifully.

He tells the truth about what his life looks like from where he is standing.

But then:

“Yet surely my right is with the LORD, and my recompense with my God.”— Isaiah 49:4

There it is.

Yet surely.

I have come to think of those words as the crossing point.

I do not understand.

Yet surely.

This does not look like what I thought You promised.

Yet surely.

I cannot reconcile Your words with my circumstances.

Yet surely.

I don’t know what happened to the dream.

Yet surely.

I don’t know what happened to the years.

Yet surely.

I don’t know whether the promise will ever look the way I imagined it.

Yet surely my right is with the LORD, and my recompense with my God.

This is not denial.

It is surrender.

And surrender is not the same thing as resignation.

Resignation says:

Nothing matters anymore.

Surrender says:

It matters so deeply that I must put it back into Your hands.

The calling.

The promise.

The ministry.

The reputation.

The years invested.

The people involved.

The prophetic words.

The disappointments.

The unanswered questions.

The future I imagined.

All of it.

Back into God’s hands.

I want to stop here and clearly distinguish the dream from my later reflections.

I could not possibly have understood in 1993 all that this experience would come to mean.

More than three decades of life and ministry have followed.

There have been joys I could not have anticipated.

There have also been disappointments, failures, broken relationships, ministry upheavals, church wounds, leadership failures, repentance, healing, reconciliation and seasons of profound reconsideration.

Through all of it, the imagery of this dream has continued to speak.

And one insight has become particularly important to me.

Perhaps the betrayal barrier is not primarily where God’s calling dies.

Perhaps it is where something else has to die.

We can receive a genuine calling from God and gradually wrap many other things around it.

Our timetable.

Our preferred outcome.

Our ambition.

Our need to succeed.

Our need to be recognized.

Our desire for vindication.

Our fear that our lives will not matter.

Our need to prove that we really heard God.

And our very human determination to make happen what we believe God has promised.

That brings me to a distinction I could not have articulated adequately in 1993:

the difference between human zeal and divine zeal.

Human zeal is not necessarily evil.

Sometimes it begins as a sincere response to God.

We love Him.

We glimpse something of His purposes.

Something burns inside us.

We want to give our lives to it.

But somewhere along the way, our zeal can become entangled with God’s zeal until we can no longer distinguish between:

what God promised

and

what we have determined must happen.

Then the betrayal barrier becomes a crucible.

The fire begins separating things.

Perhaps even the precious from the precious.

Not simply good motives from bad motives.

But human zeal from divine zeal.

And this is where the dream took an astonishing turn.

Because after the servant had said:

“I have labored in vain…”

God did not tell him that the calling had been imaginary.

He did not say:

You misunderstood everything.

Instead, Isaiah 49 expands the calling:

“It is too light a thing that you should be my servant to raise up the tribes of Jacob and to bring back the preserved of Israel;I will make you as a light for the nations, that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth.”— Isaiah 49:6

Think about that.

The servant says:

My calling failed.

God responds, in effect:

The calling you thought had failed was too small.

That changes the question.

Perhaps the betrayal barrier is not merely about whether we will keep believing for our dream.

Perhaps God is asking whether we will give Him permission to take possession of it again.

And perhaps what returns from His hands will be both recognizable and radically different.

Like a seed that disappears into the earth and emerges in another form.

The promise may survive.

The calling may survive.

The zeal may survive.

But not necessarily in the form in which we carried them across the first half of our lives.

Something has been surrendered.

Something has been purified.

Something has been enlarged.

And then, in my dream, came an image that I have never forgotten.

A branding iron.

It was hot.

And on it were words from the prophet Zechariah:

“Not by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit, says the LORD of hosts.”— Zechariah 4:6

The branding iron was pressed into the servant’s heart.

That image deserves an article of its own.

Because I increasingly believe that one of the great works of God in our lives is not to extinguish our zeal—

but to separate our zeal from His.

Not to make us passive.

But to make us free.

Not to end our participation.

But to change its source.

Not to destroy the calling.

But to return it to the One who called us in the first place.

Perhaps that is what waits on the other side of the betrayal barrier.

Next: When Human Zeal Dies and Divine Zeal Remains — What God May Be Purifying in the Death of a Dream