Another early Sunday morning

Dear Lord,

What a crazy week we just finished!  Thank you for bringing us through.  All that keeps going around and around in my head is - You are Holy, You are might, You are worthy - Worthy of praise!  I will follow, I will listen, I will love You - all of my days!  You are Lord of lords, You are King of kings, You are mighty God, Lord of everything, You're Emmanuel, You're the Great I AM, You're the Prince of Peace, who is the Lamb, You're the Living God, You're my Saving Grace, You will reign forever, You are the Ancient of Days, You're the Alpha, Omega, Beginning and End, You're my Savior, Messiah, Redeemer and Friend, You're my Prince of Peace, and I will live my life for you...

All Your names, God, are so beautiful and I know why You have so many - any one of them wouldn't be enough to describe Your glory.  To consider only one right now, the fact that You are Prince of Peace is quite an amazing and beautiful name.  As a girl from this culture, how can I help but think of the image of a prince being the one who rides in on a white horse and saves the day.  And yet, that is the exact image I think of when I hear Prince of Peace.  You triumphantly riding in, bursting into the scene in my head, with all your glory, destroying the ugliness and darkness of fear and worry and anxiety.  There are so many facets to you, Lord, that sometimes my mind and heart forget about other parts of your Character - For so long, I have considered Your love and tenderness with me - how You've carried me through the fire with Your strong arms - You have been so gentle as I got tossed and turned in the last year and a half.  I can see how You have carefully tended to me and placed Your healing over me.

And now that my mind is well again, I want to consider You as Scripture calls you - Prince of Peace.  Sometimes I wonder what it will feel like when we see our child - how will we know he or she is ours?  But I want to write down what Your peace felt like recently so that I can come back and read this as a reminder.

You have led Phil and me by the Gift of the Holy Spirit.  We don't live by "what feels good" so by any earthly definition this would not be right.  But we do know what it feels like to have the blessing and prompting from Your Holy Spirit.  It is a "peace that passes all understanding".  And this peace has come out of me - bubbled out of me - in pure joy.  When I was trying to contact agencies in our state for our home study, I had to leave a message with the one that Phil and I were most interested in.  I decided that in the meantime I would call and get information from other agencies.

I called the next one on my list.  Although the woman I spoke with was very kind, a sense of discomfort surged through me during the call.  Come to find out, their prices were over double what we were expecting the home study to cost.  They had one education training and it was smack dab in the middle of when Phil is out of the country on business and their training is THIS FALL!

Then I called another agency.  They flat out said they wouldn't do the home study - it wasn't an independent service they offered.

The first place finally called back.  Within moments of talking, the only way I can describe it is being crashed over with a wave from Your OCEAN of Peace.  The peace and clarity was so overwhelming that after the phone call I had to jump up and down and freak out for a good long while.  It's funny how Your peace turns to joy.

That should be another reminder - my joy is not dependent on this life and the situational happiness it may bring.  My joy comes from Someone Greater!  Someone Higher than any other.

I want to keep thinking about what Your name Prince of Peace means.  As I go through each day, help me not just see You as riding into my corner of the tangled, dark, thorny woods to save me, but as the Prince who's already saved me from darkness and sin and taken me back to the castle to live there - forever in the presence of the Prince of Peace.

Amen.