Grapevine Grace

I do NOT believe in coincidence.

Too many "coincidences" have happened over my lifetime to count. My sister once called one of my true stories a fairy tale.

Yesterday morning our Bible teacher just happened to talk about how the Lord has grafted us into His vine. The idea of being cut from one vine and grown into a new, stronger one. The stronger vine must be cut in order to insert and wrap the new branch.

In my personal healing journey between 2014-2016 I learned to love myself when I realized that I am one of those branches that was grafted into The Vine, aka Jesus Christ.

In order for that to happen, I had to die- let go of my past weaker, dying vine and grow forward in Christ. He allowed Himself to be cut (more like mutilated) for me - and you - so that we can have eternal life.

What struck me yesterday, was that each of our adopted children were cut suddenly from their previous homes and placed into ours. Very much the same analogy as I explained above. We have had to cut out any ideas of life as "normal" Empty-Nesters in order to parent young children.

It is the cross we bear WILLINGLY, although I have to admit that if we had known how hard it would be before we said yes, maybe we might have been too afraid and then said "NO", instead. But here is where my mind gets blown.

God KNEW I would feel incompetent for this job. He gave me a dream - well, several dreams before each of our last three children were placed with us - that I didn't understand until AFTER we said yes.

The one I'm going to share first is about the grapevine. Below is the unedited copy of my journal entry on August 3, 2020.

I have a couple of grape vines growing on the fence in front of our back door. One is not productive, in its 2nd year, the other is in its 3rd year. Last year there were only a few clusters of green grapes on the latter vine. This year there are at least 40 clusters on it. I have sprayed with neem oil when the grapes were the size of pinheads to deter bugs that were eating the leaves. Then, to even out the sugar in the whole plant, I pruned the unproductive vines away at the advice of my son’s girlfriend, who happened to grow up in Jordan where her family grew grapes. This struck me as I remembered Jesus’ words in John 15:2, “He cuts off every branch in me that bears no fruit, while every branch that does bear fruit he prunes so that it will be even more fruitful”. A few weeks ago I sprayed again with Neem oil because of bugs eating the leaves.

In the past week several of the clusters of grapes have turned dark purple and some of the grapes are even shriveling up. My kids and I tasted a purple grape to see if it was sweet but ended up having to spit it out in a hurry because of the extremely bitter, rotten flavor, which also left a terrible taste in my mouth. The strange thing is that some of the clusters on the same vine look green and healthy, although not ripe yet. It seems that the healthier ones are facing where the sun rises, whereas the ones that are rotting are more shaded. I have been perplexed about this.

On the morning of August 3, 2020, I was awoken from a dream. I was frustrated that the dream had been interrupted because I felt that it was not finished, and it was very short. Here it is:

I saw something very quickly slice both grapevines along the fence in a perfectly straight line. All that was left was short, clean twigs growing straight up from the base of both vines. As I stood looking at them in a bit of a daze, a firm, strong hand put what I thought was $14 into my palm. The reason I thought it was money was because it was the size and shape of paper bills stacked together. However, there were no markings on the bills. They were a plain military green, thick, strong paper stacked together. The hand firmly pressed the bills into my palm for about 3 seconds as if they were very important. I could not figure out why I would get paid for grape vines that were just cut, especially when at least half of them were rotten, and I couldn’t figure out why they were suddenly cut in the first place. That’s when the alarm woke me at 5:30am, with the pressure of the firm hand on the 14 military green bills in my hand and the thought “double?” in my mind.

At first, I thought this was a dream about end times harvest, but the hand that placed money into my palm didn't make any sense.

Revelation 14 is pretty vivid since it talks about the harvest and uses the grapevine analogy. I am terrible about remembering where specific scriptures are located, so this was pretty amazing.

However, now that time has unfolded new events, I think it was directly in relation to something painful our family went through in 2014, and how God was about to redeem it, in a very big way, later on the same year..

To be continued...

Jeanie King

Aka Genise Hope

Author of Raising PEARLS Children