Heavenly Father I praise You for allowing me to experience life with a wife to walk with me through good and bad times. I praise You for blessing us with children and getting to see them grow into adults and what they have become. I praise You for the time I did have with Philip before he left this world to be with You. I praise You for the blessing of grandchildren. I praise You for being able to work for the last 36 years without being unemployed or terminated. I praise You for the home we have to live in and for helping us meet the basic needs of life.
Holy Spirit I am confident and know that while I am at home in this body You created I am not living with You currently in eternity, only in spirit. I walk daily by faith, not by what I can only see. I put my trust in who You are and why I am here. I am learning daily in my walk that I exist to serve the purpose You created for me to accomplish, and this gives me hope that life will be even more fulfilling when I reach heaven and live fully in Your presence. I have learned to slow down and take one step at a time and see Your wonder all around me. I live with the understanding that I and everyone else will one day stand before You and be judged by how I lived and whether I accepted the gift of salvation into my life and learned to have a relationship with Your Spirit or if I chose to rebel and live in the sin of my choosing. [2 Corinthians 5:6-10]
Help me to be a living sacrifice pleasing to You. Help me to learn each day to renew my mind so that I do not lose sight of why I was created and how You walk, talk, inspire, and watch over me daily. Help me to learn, understand, discern, and then live the way I need to, to be pleasing to You. Let me learn what hospitality means and how to demonstrate Your love to others in action and prayer. Help me to learn to walk through my trials completely trusting and depending on Your Spirit to be with me and to help me to get through successfully so that I can become like reformed gold that has been heated enough to become pure or like a diamond that has to be cut to be made into the perfect form.
Therefore let us not sleep as others do. But let us be alert and sober. For those who sleep, sleep at night, and those who get drunk, are drunk at night. But let us, who are of the day, be sober, putting on the breastplate of faith and love, and as a helmet, the hope of salvation. For God has not appointed us to wrath, but to obtain salvation by our Lord Jesus Christ, who died for us, so that whether we are awake or asleep, we should live together with Him. So comfort yourselves together, and edify one another, just as you are doing. We ask you, brothers and sisters, to acknowledge those who labor among you, and are appointed over you in the Lord, and instruct you. Esteem them very highly in love for their work’s sake. And be at peace among yourselves. Now we exhort you, brothers, to warn those who are unruly, comfort the faint-hearted, support the weak, and be patient toward everyone. See that no one renders evil for evil to anyone. But always seek to do good to one another and all. Rejoice always. Pray without ceasing. In everything give thanks, for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus concerning you. Do not quench the Spirit. Do not despise prophecies. Examine all things. Firmly hold onto what is good. Abstain from all appearances of evil. May the very God of peace sanctify you completely. And I pray to God that your whole spirit, soul, and body be preserved blameless unto the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. Faithful is He who calls you, who also will do it. Amen. 1 Thessalonians 5:6-24