Now when the sun was going down, a deep sleep fell upon Abram; and behold, horror and great darkness fell upon him. Then He said to Abram: “Know certainly that your descendants will be strangers in a land that is not theirs, and will serve them, and they will afflict them four hundred years." (Gen 15,12-13)

Abram experienced "terrors and great darkness" right before God. No wonder he was momentarily overwhelmed by his encounter with God and his inner struggle of faith, for what accompanied his covenant with God was beyond all his previous experience.

And yet: was it really only human weakness, as I said last time? A manifestation of our humanity, to which heavenly things lie so far away that they are difficult to grasp?

Abram has just experienced darkness - and at that moment God begins to speak again, revealing to him the truth about the coming period of darkness in a foreign land. Abram's experience was thus prophetic, perhaps not the first, but certainly not the last in his life. God can speak to a person on the basis of what he or she is experiencing and then give a transcending interpretation to that experience. Abram's gloom, terror, and darkness symbolize the future Egyptian bondage of his descendants. In our lives, God may speak to us through dreams, life situations, with words we have heard, with those which were meant for us or even unintentionally caught. Sometimes we realize at that moment that we have heard them many times and yet were deaf to what they were meant to convey.

Some of our experiences thus take on a new dimension and interpretation and become a message for us. For the servants of God, the prophets - heralds of the word, they have, moreover, an overlap even to others. The prophets therefore experienced things that conveyed a message for those around them or for generations to come, as we now see with Abram.

Can anyone wonder that their lives used to be so dramatic?