Announcement:  The Happy Dance has officially commenced.  A Methodist church in the area voted tonight to allow our Classical Conversations Community to use their building at a price we can afford…FREE!!

And now back to our regularly scheduled programming…

Esther 1-5

I didn’t need to read these chapters tonight because I just read them with my daughter this week.  She has been cast as Queen Esther in a church production; we read the entire book of Esther this week to help her get into character…

One of the things we LOVED about this book is how delightfully ironic the Lord is sometimes!  But that won’t be revealed until chapter 6…

Esther was the embodiment of courage.  She risked her life for the sake of her people; if the King had been even the tiniest bit offended at her approach to his throne, she would have been executed.

That’s the kind of courage I aspire to possess but haven’t yet achieved…but through the grace of God, he HAS led me past some mountains that seemed insurmountable at the time…

…I did not ride in elevators from when I was 8 (when I got stuck in one) until I was 21…

…I refused to fly between the ages of 18 (when the pilot came on the speaker and said, ‘oops’ after a failed landing) and 22…

…I was never going to have a baby because I was afraid of the nausea of pregnancy…

…I was terrified of the water and did not swim until I took a dive of faith and enrolled in swim lessons at the age of 33…

In each of those instances, my fear and trembling, although not logical, was very real and mountainous.  The Lord moved those mountains for me, either through the people in my life, circumstances, the Word, or through all three.

Tonight I celebrate because He has moved another mountain for me.  He had this door open for us even before I knew it was closed.  He was preparing a room for us…literally.  The church just finished construction on their new classrooms the exact same day the problem happened with the facility we had been using.

Wow.  Sometimes the Lord simply takes my breath away!