INTRO
Welcome to Set Apart Conversations, the space where we hold the clinical and the spiritual in the same hand. Here, we don’t ask you to choose between your discernment and your diagnosis, or between your prayer life and your nervous system. I’m Shenera, a mental health counselor, a writer, published author and a woman who has learned to trust what my body and my spirit tell me before my mind has the language to explain it.
Every episode here starts from the same conviction. You are mind, body, spirit, and soul, distinct parts functioning as one. What happens in the natural rarely stays separate from what happens in the spirit, and what happens in the spirit rarely stays separate from what happens in the body. So we’re going to keep walking that line together, honestly, without flattening either side to make the other one more comfortable. If you’re new here, come as you are. If you’ve been listening for a while, you already know what this space asks of you: stay awake, stay discerning, and stay covered.
Today, we’re talking about frogs. Stay with me. It’s going somewhere. Before we get into it, I want to point you to the full written piece, called “What the Frogs Knew,” over on Watchwoman Writings, a subsection of Mind, Body & Spirit Chronicles on my Substack. It goes deeper into the Scripture and the details than I’ll have time for here. If something today grabs you, that’s where you can go to sit with it further. The link is in the show notes.
Let’s begin.
I want to start today with a dream because I’ve learned by now that when Adonai gives me a dream in pieces, when I remember only one scene from what felt like a much longer night, that one scene is the one I’m meant to sit with.
SEGMENT ONE: THE DREAM
I was in my bedroom, on my own bed, and there was a small green frog beside me. I want you to understand that, in real life, I am not a woman who touches a frog. If one landed on my bed while I was awake, I would be out of that room before my feet fully registered what I was seeing. But in the dream, I was petting it. I used slow, easy strokes, the same way I pet my cat when she leans into my hand and looks up at me as though she’s asking for it. I felt no fear at all.
Then the frog started to hop, and another frog climbed up from behind my headboard, emerging from the part of the bed frame I couldn’t see while I was lying there. Then a third frog appeared. I simply watched, curious and unafraid. Then a bigger frog hopped onto the bed and ate the smaller one right beside me. I remember thinking in the dream, Oh, I guess that’s what frogs do. They eat each other. I wasn’t disturbed by it. More frogs came, bigger ones, and they continued hopping around as though nothing had happened. They were calm, patterned, and simply doing what frogs do.
I woke up knowing that dream wasn’t random.
SEGMENT TWO: HOW ADONAI HAS ALWAYS SPOKEN THROUGH DREAMS
I wasn’t raised to analyze my dreams. My mother believed dreams told stories of their own, but sitting with them the way I do now wasn’t instilled in me while I was growing up. This began at a specific point in my life, when the Spirit of Truth entered my life and identified Himself, not first by the name Yeshua, but by that title: the Spirit of Truth. That was in February 2022, and it marked the beginning of an awareness of the natural and spiritual intersecting that has never left me.
Scripture names that title directly. In the Book of Yochanan, what you would know in English as John, Yeshua tells His disciples that when the Spirit of Truth comes, He will guide them into all truth. He will not speak on His own authority, but only what He hears. That is exactly how He introduced Himself to me. He did not first approach me with a name I had been taught to expect. He approached me with a title that told me plainly what He does.
Scripture also supports dreams as a channel of communication, not only for me, but generally. In Bamidbar, which is Numbers, chapter 12, Adonai tells Aharon and Miriam plainly that when there is a prophet among them, He makes Himself known through a vision and speaks through a dream. Yosef was given two dreams as a young man, and both came to pass exactly as shown years later in Egypt. Daniyel interpreted dreams for kings who did not even worship Adonai, and he later received dreams of his own.
A dream warned Yosef, the husband of Miriam, to flee to Egypt with the child. Another dream told him when it was safe to return. Yoel, chapter 2, promises that in the last days, old men will dream dreams and young men will see visions. That promise is tied to the outpouring of the Spirit, not to superstition. In Hebrew, the word for dream is chalom, from the root chalam, which also carries the sense of being made healthy and strong. I love that. A dream is not only a message. It can also be part of how you are being strengthened or prepared, even when what it contains unsettles you at first.
SEGMENT THREE: THE NATURAL SIDE OF DREAMS
Here is where I don’t believe the spiritual and the natural are in competition. Sleep researchers have understood for a long time that dreams occur most vividly during REM sleep, when the brain is performing some of its most active work. It is consolidating memories and processing emotional material that your conscious mind may not yet have felt safe enough to confront directly. Some call this threat simulation. The sleeping brain rehearses danger and relational rupture in symbolic form because the waking mind may have been too busy, too guarded, or too invested to deal with them directly. What I couldn’t yet say aloud about a man’s home, a courthouse, or a marriage, my sleeping mind was already turning into frogs on a bed.
Adonai speaks through dreams. The sleeping brain processes what the waking mind has not yet caught up with. Both can happen within the same skull, at the same time, and I have never needed to choose one explanation over the other to trust what I was shown. I also want to name something about how we are put together because it matters here. We are mind, body, spirit, and soul, distinct parts functioning as one, in the same way that Adonai is echad, one, while being expressed in different ways. We are organic, formed from dust, but we also carry a soul and a human spirit that are entirely our own. Some people also carry spirits that were never originally theirs.
I want to be clear that this is not a no-fault situation. We are given the ability to choose, and choices can open that door. Sometimes the opening comes through a generational agreement made by someone in our family line, knowingly or unknowingly, that was never broken. At other times, it comes through an agreement we made ourselves, whether knowingly or unknowingly. Responsibility does not disappear either way.
SEGMENT FOUR: WHAT SCRIPTURE SAYS ABOUT FROGS SPECIFICALLY
Frogs appear twice in Scripture in ways that matter here. In Shemot or Exodus, the plague of frogs is distinctive because of where the frogs go. They do not remain in the river. They enter the houses, ovens, and kneading bowls. More intimately, Scripture says they enter the bedchambers and climb onto the beds. In Egypt, the frogs were not a distant threat. They invaded the most private room in the household and were present where people slept and awakened. Then, in Hitgalut, or Revelation, chapter 16, verse 13, frogs appear again in a different form. Three unclean spirits, resembling frogs, come from the mouths of the dragon, the beast, and the false prophet. They form a trio gathering forces.
Here, the frog is not merely arriving. It is speaking. Persuading. Recruiting.
When I place those accounts together, I begin to recognize the shape of what I believe I was shown. Something can enter your most guarded space without announcing what it is. Once inside, it may not remain singular. Yet there is a detail in my dream that Scripture does not provide, and I believe that distinction matters.
In Exodus, the frogs came up from the river. They originated outside the house and crossed into the household before reaching the bed. In my dream, however, the second and third frogs did not enter through a door or window. They hopped from behind my headboard, from the part of the bed frame I could not see while lying there. Nothing crossed a visible threshold to reach me. It was already positioned inside the room, waiting in the one place my eyes could not reach while my head rested on the pillow. That distinction has changed how I understand the dream. Exodus warns about what attempts to enter. My headboard warns me about what may already be positioned precisely where I am least able to watch for it. Not at my door, but behind my own head, in the place I trust enough to rest against without ever turning around to examine what may be concealed there.
SEGMENT FIVE: THE PRINCIPLE AND THE BED THAT TOLD THE TRUTH
I wasn’t afraid of that frog, and that is the part I have sat with the longest. The absence of fear wasn’t peace. It was familiarity that hadn’t yet been tested. Let me bring this down into something real. Earlier this year, I spent a few weeks getting to know someone. I didn’t spend years with him, so I never had the opportunity to watch a pattern repeat the way I eventually did with my estranged husband. What I got instead was a room, and that room told me everything. The Heinekens lined up in his refrigerator told me something before he ever opened his mouth. The pineapple mixers he said belonged to his children told me even more because no parent buys pineapple mixers or pineapple juice for a child, and I knew that was a lie the moment I heard it. His shirts were ironed and lined up. His pants were arranged the same way. His freezer was immaculate, with everything positioned precisely. Even his lettuce wasn’t simply left in the bag. It was washed, separated, and laid on a paper towel in the crisper to keep it crisp.
Most people don’t do that. I noticed all of it.
Most people would have walked through a home that orderly and simply thought, He’s a tidy person. I didn’t dismiss it because that level of control over shirts, lettuce, and freezer shelves is rarely only about being neat. It is often about managing what you can control because so much else remains outside your control. There is a reason I never felt at ease in that house. My body carried a sense of unease from the first time I walked inside, before my mind had the language to explain why.
My spirit and my body already had the answer. It was my mind, my brain, that needed time to catch up because it was still collecting, analyzing, and processing the data before allowing me to name what I was actually seeing.
This is where the clinical and the spiritual stop being two separate conversations for me. In the therapy room, we call this interoception: the nervous system detecting incongruence before the conscious mind can name it. In the spirit, we call it discernment. Different vocabulary. Same faculty. Both are given for the same reason, so you don’t sit there petting something that is only pretending to be your cat.
THE SPACES WE CREATE FOR OURSELVES
Not every room is warning us. Some rooms become places we intentionally create for rest. I have become much more conscious of what surrounds me when I sleep and write: the texture of the bedding, the light beside the bed, the objects I allow into the room, and whether the space itself permits my nervous system to settle. Sometimes creating that atmosphere does not require anything elaborate. It can be as simple as a gold satin pillowcase or the warm glow of a dimmable bedside lamp.
There is something meaningful about creating a space where the body does not have to remain on guard. After learning to listen when a house tells the truth, I have also learned to pay attention to the kind of truth I want my own space to tell me: you are safe enough to rest here.
A few things I use to create that kind of atmosphere:
Gold satin pillowcase Dimmable bedside lamp
Sometimes the smallest changes in a room, the texture of the bedding or the quality of the light beside the bed, can change how the body experiences the space.
Disclosure: This post contains affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate, I may earn from qualifying purchases.
SEGMENT SIX: THE WATCHWOMAN’S TASK
With the estranged husband, it wasn’t that I recognized the pattern too late. There were pink flags from our very first conversation. My mind was already storing them, but I continued moving forward anyway. Those pink flags became red flags over time, both in the natural and in the spirit, until they were everywhere. By then, an entire life had been built around the pattern. There was a marriage, a relocation, and years of shared history. There was no longer a way out that didn’t cost something enormous.
That is not a failure of discernment. That is what happens when the evidence continues escalating while you are already living inside the structure it built. With this most recent man, I didn’t wait for a pattern to repeat. I read the room instead of waiting to read the relationship, and I was out before there was a shared address or years of history to untangle. That is the difference it makes when vigilance is allowed to mature.
Shamar: to guard.
Natsar: to preserve what is pure.
Tsaphah: to watch from a distance before danger reaches the door.
Shaqad: to remain wakeful, even when everything around you says, Relax.
I don’t believe that dream was only about one man. I believe I was shown something I have now encountered more than once, and perhaps something I haven’t yet fully named. But I know this: the smaller frog was eaten right in front of me, and I didn’t flinch. That stillness, more than the eating itself, was the actual warning. If you have ever sat in a room where your body refused to relax, even while everything looked fine on the surface…
Trust your body. It was never confused. It was watching before you were.
Go read the full piece, “What the Frogs Knew,” on Watchwoman Writings…
This has been Set Apart Conversations.
Until next time, stay awake, stay discerning, and stay covered.
Scripture references: Shemot (Exodus) 8:3; Hitgalut (Revelation) 16:13; Bamidbar (Numbers) 12:6; Yochanan (John) 16:13; and Yoel (Joel) 2:28.
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