Thoughts from Mark "Hat" Rackley

“And afterward,
    I will pour out my Spirit on all people.
Your sons and daughters will prophesy,
    your old men will dream dreams,
    your young men will see visions.

• Joel 2:28

Then I heard a loud voice in heaven say:
“Now have come the salvation and the power
    and the kingdom of our God,
    and the authority of his Messiah.
For the accuser of our brothers and sisters,
    who accuses them before our God day and night,
    has been hurled down.

• Revelation 12:10

You belong to your father, the devil, and you want to carry out your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, not holding to the truth, for there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks his native language, for he is a liar and the father of lies.

• John 8:44

But the goat chosen by lot as the scapegoat shall be presented alive before the Lord to be used for making atonement by sending it into the wilderness as a scapegoat.

• Leviticus 16:10

Sitting down, Jesus called the Twelve and said, “Anyone who wants to be first must be the very last, and the servant of all.”

• Mark 9:35

Then I saw a great white throne and him who was seated on it. The earth and the heavens fled from his presence, and there was no place for them. And I saw the dead, great and small, standing before the throne, and books were opened. Another book was opened, which is the book of life. The dead were judged according to what they had done as recorded in the books. The sea gave up the dead that were in it, and death and Hades gave up the dead that were in them, and each person was judged according to what they had done. Then death and Hades were thrown into the lake of fire. The lake of fire is the second death. Anyone whose name was not found written in the book of life was thrown into the lake of fire.

• Revelation 20:11-15

At this moment while writing this, there is a load of clothing in the dryer.  I will get around to the dishes in the sink, left over from last night…  I promise.  And has the sun come up yet?

But I was very tired yesterday.  One of my accomplishments was rearranging the bed.  I had not been using my wedge pillow.  Maybe using it will reduce the neck pain in the morning.

So, I went to bed to test my theory and get some well needed sleep.  But the Accuser had other plans.  Not all our dreams come from God, but God wants us to learn from the dreams we get from the Accuser.

The following is my dream that awoke me exactly at five in the morning.  I checked my watch.  I often revisit dreams if I quickly go back to sleep, and this one was a dream I did not wish to return to.

A friend from my old workplace needed some help.  I had something that I had written years ago… It would have to be years ago since I was laid off over ten years ago.  But by some hook or crook, I had gotten by the security to get into the building.  I gave him the information he needed.  He joked about the good old days, but I did not stay long.

I got up and left his office, but I did not get far before I was stopped by the Accuser.  The Accuser asked what I was doing there.  I said that I was helping a friend.  The Accuser said that I had no friends there.  I had been laid off.  I was worthless.  No one would be a friend of a worthless man like me.

I protested, “I did a lot for this company.  I have knowledge that can keep a project going when it stalls.  Besides, this is a free country.”

The Accuser laughed, “What knowledge do you have?  The things that you accomplished for this company can barely be contained in this room, but this company is a lot bigger than this room.  We are a global empire.  What great knowledge do you have?”  Then he pointed to the door.  In the Accuser’s hand was the official record of all my faults.  I knew what was contained in that book.  I hung my head and rushed for the door.

The room became deathly quiet.  I saw people who had been my friends, but they said nothing or they would follow me out the door.  It was a huge bullpen of tiny cubicles, half the size of a football field.  Hundreds of eyes, some tearful, all frightened.

Then I looked at the doors of the walled offices, the offices with windows.  The huge bullpen could not see outside.  They were trapped, but the executives had windows.  And the executives broke the silence by laughing at me as I exited.

One executive, actually many, but the one executive represented the many.  He accused me of making his project fail.  I had never been assigned to his project, but I made a good scapegoat.  That had happened a few times in my career, maybe more in that once you become a scapegoat for the mistakes of others, they pile on without you even knowing.

Another representative executive that laughed had taken full credit for my success.  If you looked at the Accuser’s official record of my working career, you would not see many accomplishments.  Those accomplishments had gotten my boss promoted, and my boss being like the cupbearer who was restored to Pharoah’s side, I (like with Joseph in prison) was forgotten.

Yes, the Accuser had an official looking document that contained my official accomplishments.  It was rather thin.  Others had taken credit for those accomplishments.  On the negative side, I had been the scapegoat for numerous projects that had failed, projects that I never had been assigned to work on.

I was indeed a failure.

But I looked as I was leaving the bullpen.  One wall was white and glowing.  The rest of the room was painted gray.  This one wall stood out.  But I failed to notice what it was.

I exited the room, and I saw a member of my Sunday school class in the lobby.  It was as if he knew what had occurred.  He looked with knowing eyes and said nothing.  I nodded and walked past and left the building.  Note: He had never worked with me or with the company, and we were both retired.  He had no reason to be there other than to remind me that the Accuser did not have the last word.

In leaving the building, I woke up from my dream.  My heart was racing.  My forty years of hard work came down to the Accuser running me off the property.

Then, I started thinking about things in the dream.  Why did the idea of a bullpen that was half the size of a football field stick in my mind?  In a cubicle arrangement, you can have a roomy cubicle (a little tongue in cheek there) and still have room for a walkway, in 100 square feet.  Cubicles are usually about five feet by ten feet, giving room for a visitor chair on the edge of a walkway.  A football field, counting the end zones in length and the width of the playing field, but not counting the sidelines, is 57,600 square feet.  Half that in number of cubicles would be 288 cubicles.  The exact number of people is not important, but those hundreds of people had been my friends because in time of need, I had helped them.  I had been a servant to many, whoever needed help.

It suddenly dawned on me what that white wall was.  Our company was taken over by a European company.  They made a business out of buying businesses and converting the business into what they wanted.  They had no clue what we really did, so we were a name that they could use to open doors in the USA.  At present, I think 2-3 people from our company still work there.  Maybe they have gone.  I have not had contact with anyone there for a while…

But to the wall…

One day, the new company president walked past my office and turned to the old company president, guaranteed a job for a couple of years as a teacher, passing on the knowledge to the new company president.  (He rarely if ever listened.)  But he stopped at a white wall in the midst of many gray walls.  With disgust, he said, “What is this?  Get rid of it!”

The old company president said, “We can’t do that.  That is the history of our company.  Every piece of equipment that we have ever designed and built had a textbook written to teach the customer’s people.  If we get a call from a customer, we can turn to that wall and learn exactly what we built for the customer and how his employees were taught to operate it and maintain it.  It has information on the unique things that the customer made using our equipment that might be very different than the standard run of the mill stuff.  And if you want to know what is contained in these books, there is the guy with all the information.  He wrote most of the books in this wall of bookshelves.”  The old company president pointed to me. I never felt so proud.  The president of the company (okay, former president) saying that I had worth.

If the Accuser was that last company president that I worked for, he was the one who complimented me on saving a multimillion dollar project and our sister company’s reputation with a good customer, but I was laid off anyway.  And since I was a man of my word, I had promised to fill in for someone else on that project the next week.  They paid me less than 25% of what they charged the customer for my time, and I no longer was accounted for in the overhead.

But the real Accuser is Satan, and he is the father of lies.  God interfered with the devil’s dream long enough for me to see the wall of books, bound in white binders that filled the wall, hundreds of books, and most of them books that I had written.  The “official record” said that I was worthless to give them reason to get rid of me.  And I am sure that the books filled a dumpster soon after.  (Could they all fit in one dumpster?)

But the book that counts is being in the Book of Life.  I did not write my name there.  God loves me, and He put my name there.  I am not worthless, I am a sinner saved by Grace, and an adopted son of God most High.

Soli Deo Gloria.  Only to God be the Glory.