Home Insurance

Last night I dreamed that Göran and I arrived home from a vacation to find that the house we were living in had been broken into and vandalized by malicious thieves. They had riddled the doors and the walls with bullets, and had been so destructive that the house was literally falling to pieces. When I called the insurance company to find out if they could help us repair our home, I was informed over the phone that we had been late in our last insurance payment, which meant that, unfortunately, our house had not been covered at the time of the vandalism. We were on our own.

In an odd twist, Göran found among the ruins of a collapsed wall an old office photocopier. He opened the front of the photocopier and found an insurance policy inside, and was asking me if this might cover us.

As soon as I woke up, I knew what the photocopier represented. Yesterday during Stake Conference, our Stake President spoke about the principle of repetition, how the Lord emphasizes certain key principles in scripture by repeating certain words and phrases again and again. He drew attention to this in the Book of Mormon story of the Brother of Jared, where the phrase "tight like unto a dish" appears seven times (in Ether 2:17 and 6:7). If this phrase were not repeated enough in scripture, it was repeated multiple times by our Stake President. Elder Bednar in his talk said, "Pay attention to what your Stake President just told you!" and then proceeded to repeat it several times himself.

The phrase "tight like unto a dish" is in fact a key to understanding my dream, because in the story of the Brother of Jared it refers to the most important characteristic of the boats that carried the Jaredites safely across the ocean. The dish-like tightness of the boats was what kept the destructive ocean waters out, even when the boats were completely submerged under the waves. In my dream, our house was definitely not "tight like unto a dish." It was riddled with bullet-holes and falling apart, destroyed by thieves and vandals who had broken in from without.

The fact that an "insurance policy" appeared in my dream inside a photocopy machine was essentially a not so subtle message that I should pay attention to the message which was repeated multiple times in scripture and in the talks I heard yesterday!

What is my home insurance policy? The promise I have received numerous times through the Spirit that if I lived faithfully, obeying as many of the commandments as I could, honoring my relationship with Göran as I would honor a legally contracted marriage, I would be blessed and Göran and I and our whole family would be saved. This was a call to repentance to me, to examine those aspects of my life where I am not being as faithful as I ought, and to immediately put down a payment on my insurance policy.

I should know this from working at a law firm (where there are several photocopiers on every floor). The thing about multiple reminders is, they only do you good if you act on them before the deadline.