A Name Revealed in the Midst of Fear

One night, fear I couldn’t explain gave way to a dream, and a name I had never heard. What it meant told me who I am to God, and to the enemy who wanted me to forget it.

A few weeks before the night I was woken at two in the morning and shown the “chaos” that had taken root in my mind—a night I’ve written about in its own post—there was another that marked me just as deeply.

For a while, waking at two or three in the morning had simply become part of my life. I chalked it up to too much caffeine or to the hot flashes that came with this season of life. The wakeful nights had stacked one on top of another for so long that I had stopped questioning them. This was just my normal now.

What made them hard wasn’t only the lost sleep. It was what filled my mind the moment my eyes opened. The thoughts came in a flood: that I had forgotten to do something the day before, that I needed to tell someone something, that I should have handled a problem differently, that I had said the wrong thing to a friend and left a bad impression, that if I didn’t fix some small thing right away there would be a consequence I’d regret. On the surface they looked like ordinary mental housekeeping. Underneath, every one of them was stitched together with fear.

The thoughts would loop and feed on themselves, and the adrenaline they stirred kept me awake for two or three hours before my body finally gave out. I would sleep for maybe an hour before it was time to get up. Living on three to five hours of rest became routine, and I moved through my days drained and foggy, working at half capacity and calling it normal.

It had crept in so gradually that I never saw it take hold. Each night was only a little heavier than the one before, the intensity climbing by degrees too small to notice, until one night in the middle of October 2025 I woke at two in the morning inside a full-blown panic attack. What happened next I can only describe as marvelous.

From my journal, October 25

Nathan and I were both jolted awake at two that morning, though neither of us knew the other had been lying there awake until we compared notes the next day. We had each been swallowed by the same thing: a wave of anxiety with nothing behind it, our hearts pounding, our minds crowded with fearful, irrational thoughts. Every bit of calm and safety had been pulled out from under us, even though nothing in our actual lives was wrong. It was pure, baseless fear.

I prayed for hours, wrestling my racing thoughts back down, until sleep finally returned. And when it did, I dropped straight into a vivid dream.

I walked into a room that felt like a small-town pub, dim and low-lit, people scattered at the tables and lost in their own conversations. As I stepped inside, I noticed a small, noisy cluster of figures off to my left, tucked back in the shadows and celebrating something. Their voices carried anyway. They sounded giddy, almost disbelieving, like people who had just gotten away with something they never expected to pull off.

They were shouting.

“We did it!”

“We killed it!”

“We destroyed it!”

“We conquered Alona Peace!”

One of them stepped out of the shadows, held my eyes, and smiled wide. “We killed Alona Peace,” he said.

Over and over in the dream I repeated the phrase to myself—Alona Peace, Alona Peace—determined to hold onto it long enough to look it up when I woke. Then Nathan's alarm went off. He left for work, and I got up to start the day.

When I finally searched the words, what I found stopped me cold. Alona is a Hebrew feminine noun, and it means oak tree.

Not long before, I had been praying through Isaiah 61:3, asking God—hesitantly, almost afraid to hope—whether I might ever be counted among the oaks of righteousness, a planting of the Lord for the display of His splendor. And here, in a dream, the enemy had handed me the answer to that very prayer, wrapped in a name I had never heard.

The other meanings I turned up only deepened it. Across languages, Alona carried the sense of an oak, strength and resilience, but also bright, shining light in its Slavic roots, precious or offering in Hawaiian, noble in German, little rock in Breton.

To be called an oak. To be tied, without my asking, to bright and shining light, which is the very language of Isaiah 60:1, a verse God had already marked over my life. To be named precious, noble, and strong.

And the enemy knew me by those names. That was what rattled him enough to celebrate. He had managed to steal my peace for a little while, and he threw a party over it. But the theft was temporary, and the One who names me is not. God loves me, answers me, and tells the truth about who I am, even to the powers that would rather I never heard it. Jesus reigns, and when He speaks, it is love.

What the night taught me

A few things settled into me afterward. God speaks in the direction of peace, and the fear that had flooded those nights was never His voice. Our truest identity often surfaces in the most unexpected moments, and mine came through a dream I hadn’t asked for. And God, it turned out, had been paying close attention to the quiet ache underneath my prayers. I had struggled for years to believe I could really be called an oak of righteousness; it felt like too much to claim, even after a lifetime of trying to follow Him. He answered the question anyway, in a way I could never have manufactured or argued myself into.

I also learned that the enemy tends to go straight for whatever God is strengthening, and that his intimidation cannot survive contact with God’s truth. Even a dream, I found, can be a place where God restores confidence and clarity, sometimes simply His way of letting us know He is listening and that we are loved.

This is the encounter that later shaped the middle name I write under. Alona sits quietly inside “Marin A. Welles” as my own private reminder of where my peace actually comes from, and Who defends it.

For you, dear reader

God knows how to reach us, and sometimes He does it through a dream, even in the middle of a restless, frightening night. If you have ever come awake with fear pressing on you, or carried a dream that wouldn’t leave your spirit, bring it to Him and ask what He wants you to see. He is faithful to answer with clarity, to guard your peace, and to remind you exactly who you are to Him.