Early morning March 13th of 2007, I had a profound dream.
In this dream, aliens were invading the earth. I was living at my Father’s house where I grew up. The first thing they did was give everyone on earth ear and eye implants. The way these devices worked, is you would see and hear everything as normal, but the aliens could no longer be detected, heard or seen by those who had received the implants.
I had rebelled against this alien invasion and was one of the remnant of remaining people who had not receive the implants.
In the dream I was in my parent’s basement. Located there, was a kind of diorama of a shopping mall. I was looking down into this. The aliens were puppeteering the humans, but the humans were not aware of the “strings” and those pulling them. The aliens were guiding a woman in an endless circle around the mall. She was moving from one shiny object to the next. From one store to the next. Around and around.
The game the aliens were playing was distracting this woman from doing anything purposeful, anything eternal, anything to keep her away from God’s purpose and plan. Like in the parable of the sower, where some of the seeds were sown among thicket bushes, choking out life through the cares of this world.
Two and half a years later, when we ran out of money, people’s reactions in our Christian circles was rejection. Many were confused as to why we would be going through such a trial. Others became convinced we must have hidden sin in our lives, because why else would we be suffering like this?
I was persecuted by the very leaders, colleagues, and disciples I had served with or for. It was far worse than the trial of running out of money, which was bad enough. “Sufficient is the trouble for this day.” Why? Because life long relationships were being torn apart by lies and misunderstandings.
It was in this pressure cooker that the Lord spoke to me through the movie, “The Matrix.” Remarkably, it was very much a parallel story to my dream. In the movie the matrix was created by “machines”. These machines had disguised themselves as being invisible, but the agents acted like a police force enforcing there rules. The people had submitted to a hidden force – known as the Matrix. Yet, they did not comprehend it. Neo was a slave, but he didn’t even know it. A slave to his career and the expectations of others who he assumed were legitimate authority.
The Lord really spoke to me about money idolotry being the “3rd rail” of American Christianity. That money was such a strong idol and false God amongst Christians that it had created almost a type of enslavement through fear. The fear was so strong (even though most didn’t recognize it – as long as you had enough money you were lulled into conformity) that people went out of the way to try to get me to stop what I was attempting to do (trust God by faith) because of how it made them feel in their own lives. Fear. Strong.