Recurring Law School Dream

Rex, my friend from law school just wrote me a note to tell me about his recurring law school dream:
" Finals were stressful, but generally I handled the stress OK. Some were worse than others. You know, I still have this recurring bad dream about law school. It's changed a bit over the years, but it basically revolves around them discovering I was an hour short, and I could have made it up if I'd known it before the latest semester, but it's too late. I'll have to go back and start all over from the LSAT. I can't do something else or I'll get in trouble for practicing law without a license. I wake up with a sick feeling every time. I have no idea what they did to my brain that causes that...."

This would not be so odd, except that I have almost the exact recurring law school dream. Mine is: I discover I am one class or credit short right when I'm about to graduate from law school. Had I known I needed the class, I would have taken it, but it is either because I failed an exam or I just came up short when counting credits. As a result, I'm sitting there in my cap and gown and realize I have to start law school all over again! Sometimes I end up just having to take the class the next year and I can graduate, but when I realize that I can't get my law degree, I wake up...same sick feeling every time. 

Could it be that they actually did alter our brains during law school? Could it be the fact that your entire grade rests on one final exam and there is no way to make up the class, except to take it again? Could it be that we studied so hard for our exams that the only thing that counted was finals week. In reality the entire trimester (in our case) mattered because you could never cram everything you needed to know in your head unless you understood the materials, read everything, briefed your cases and made your outlines along the way! Yet the only way the professor knew if you understood it all was to give you that final exam. Intense is putting it mildly...watching classmates fall like flies after a year was perhaps the worst. Who would be next to drop out because they just could not make the grade? No one thought it would be you...so in your dream you imagine it is you and you realize that your world will end if you don't have all your classes and credits by the end of the three years!

Whew! So glad it is just a dream...but maybe that is what life is all about. One big test and in the end, when you're standing before those Pearly Gates you have to ask yourself, did I miss the purpose of this life? Did I fail to get all of the credits I needed to pass from this life to the next? Surely I won't have to start all over again! Nope...that's not how it works (whew!) and there's no getting into Heaven by your own good works (that's good). Only one way....trusting in the saving grace of Jesus Christ. That seems too easy...and yet, it is the hardest test we'll ever take...the test of trust...complete trust and faith in Him. 

My hope is in the truth of God's word and I will wake up on the other side with a glorious feeling of relief just as Paul said in 2 Timothy 4:7-8, "I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith: Henceforth there is laid up for me a crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous judge, shall give me at that day: and not to me only, but unto all them also that love his appearing."

Rex, that should make you feel better!