A while back a friend shared a vision she was given which I think is incredibly relevant to what is going on in the world right now. Even if you’re not a Christian and don’t believe in anything, this will be interesting to you. The person who was given this vision shared it online but has since taken it down. So I’m sharing it from memory, with her permission.

In the vision, my friend was sitting on a hill in a wilderness overlooking a walled city. Within the city, towers were being built. But just as a tower would reach it’s full height, a giant snake would rise up and devour the tower from the top down to the bottom. Then another tower would be built in its place, taller than the last. But each time, a snake would come and devour it as it reached its full height. At first, this process happened slowly, but as she watched the rate at which the towers were rising and falling became faster and faster. Soon, the rate at which towers were rising and falling reached dizzying speeds. Chaos was taking over.

Suddenly, the doors of the city flew open and a trickle of people began leaving the city. As they left the city, they shed their clothing at the city gates before heading out into the wilderness surrounding the city. My friend looked around and saw that all around the city there were others such as herself who had been living in the wilderness. The people leaving the city found their way to these people who taught them the secrets for living outside the city. Soon the trickle of people leaving the city became a flood and the first people to leave the city began instructing those who came behind them in how to survive outside the city walls. At the end of the vision, the city was empty and desolate. 

This is what my friend was told that the vision meant: the city itself represents the project of human civilization. The towers represented civilizations, ideologies and empires. The snakes represented the forces which inevitably lead to the downfall of every civilization, ideology and empire in history. Today we live in a time in which these civilizations, ideologies and empires are rising and falling more quickly than ever before.

The people leaving the city were those who had lost faith in the ability of civilizations, ideologies and empires to provide for their safety and well being. They removed their clothing as they left the city to represent the shedding of their humanly created ideas of how to live. The people who lived in the wilderness around the city are those who God had called out, trained and prepared in his ways. These are people who either left behind human ideologies or never bought into them in the first place.

What my friend was told and shown was that we are rapidly approaching a time when people will lose their faith in the ways of this world – the reaching for power, control, greed, violence, hatred, conflict, self-protection and the like which have ordered human affairs for millennia now. At some point, the failure of any system, any ideology, any human created force will cause people to decide that they are better off abandoning their faith in these very human creations and turn back to the wilderness – God’s ways.

Here are a few take aways which I think are important, particularly in regards to the times we live in:

1. If you believe that there is a system of thought, a form of government, an ideology or leader who can or will put us on the right track or save us, you are fooling yourself. Every last one of those things is destined for inevitable failure. None of them will ever, ever do what you think they can do. If you’re actively involved in building one of these towers, you might as well walk away now. It’s going to come crashing down on your head soon enough.

2. The city and the wilderness around the city are metaphors and don’t necessarily represent us losing our creature comforts and reverting to living in caves. Rather the city and wilderness represent two different ways or approaches to organizing the world. “God’s ways” are love, compassion, service, humility, patience, sacrifice, forgiveness, self-control and freedom. These stand in complete contrast to the driving forces of control, condemnation, power, hierarchies, violence, greed, intolerance, fear, dualism and the like which have shaped human affairs for millennia. (I’ll be getting into this more in the next few days, so if you aren’t already subscribed, you should go to the doo-hicky over on the right and fix that.)

3. While it is alarming to watch these towers fall, raining their bricks and mortar down on the heads of anyone nearby, it is also necessary in order to wake people up to the reality that we are never going to be able to succeed in our project of controlling the world and each other. Many of us are going to have to realize in a visceral way that we will never get where we want to go doing what we’ve been doing. (You can read a bit more about this process here. It’s what I like to call a planet wide arsehole identification educational program.)

4. If you are frequently disoriented, agitated, angered, despairing, frustrated or downright apoplectic over the state of the world and your fellow man, that is your spirit telling you it’s time to turn away and leave the city. Not necessarily close your eyes to what’s happening or stop speaking out entirely, but let go of your attachment to it. What will happen will happen. At this point, the die has been set for many things. The best thing you can do is put your energy into ridding yourself of your attachment to the ways of the city and orienting yourself to life in the wilderness.

5. If you are one of the people who has been watching from the hills outside the city, don’t let yourself get too caught up in the spectacle going on in the city. Not only is it bad for your mental, spiritual and even physical health, the gates will be opening soon. There will be people coming to you who are going to need you to teach them what you know about the wilderness.

Tomorrow: Rule #1-ish: Do what you can for someone in desperate need before you do anything else.