Ok, so I feel like it is about time to break from my usual
blogging routine and write something new and closer to home. No worries, I will still be posting my
regular update next week as usual. But recently,
what has been on my mind a lot is my relationship with my husband and
relationships in general.
Within the last couple of weeks, multiple guys in my unit
have had their relationships end and multiple people are having marital
stress. This is the strain of the 1/3
mark. We are at our first milestone for
time but we still have 2/3 to go. And
that is a stressful time for families and friends. It is a time of reflection on how hard the
last three months again and causes angst when realizing we have six to go.
But for Kevin and I we haven’t seemed to hit that wall, or
any since I got here. I think the
difference is in faith and expectations.
In my last blog, you can see shadows of these thoughts in my writing. But I want to spend more time on them then I
did. So, this blog will be solely
focused on the spiritual journey of one traveling so far away from home, into a
war zone, with complete peace regarding a life lost back home.
So to tell this story, I will begin with my
expectations. My marriage is no longer
what it was. I cannot honestly say that
it is better, and really… it is probably worse.
To go from living with someone and doing life with them daily to being
restricted in communication will do that.
I do all of my work on classified networks and cannot share most of what
I do. I can give some generalities, but
those are not conducive to day to day updates.
My husband and I live two very different lives. He has joined two new organizations since I
left and is taking two grad school classes.
His schedule is full of new activities and new people and I am not a
part of that world. I am surrounded by
new people, doing a new job in a new place.
It is nearly impossible to describe to someone what life is like over
here. It is hard to explain that rocket
attacks aren’t scary, they are just inconvenient when I am trying to
sleep. And if they happen while I am at
work, they get completely ignored.
Saying we live two separate lives is an absolute statement of the
obvious.
But what seems to be different for us, is that we expected
this. Most people go into a deployment
trying to maximize the amount of time they spend talking to their spouse so
they don’t lose that connection with them.
Both parties try to hinder their growth so that they do not grow without
the other person. They fear that an
inevitability of that growth is that they will grow apart. But what they fail to realize is that,
despite their best efforts, they will continue to grow and it won’t be deliberately
towards each other. My guess is that
these people will struggle when we return because they haven’t accepted that
growth occurred and they won’t until it is thrown in their laps.
But this is what I expected. I mourned the loss of my marriage
for what it was before I even left. The
hardest part of leaving was knowing that everything would change and that I
wouldn’t be able to control it. Truth be
told, I doubt there was a day in those
last couple of weeks where I didn’t cry and mourn over the loss of intimacy
with my husband that I knew I was going to experience. But that grew into an acceptance and a new
expectation that was based on faith.
A few months before I left, my small group at church did a
study where we read through the new testament in 8 weeks. As I read, I was constantly floored as time
and again, I read Paul’s letters to people he had never met confirming his love
for them and making statements like “I pray without ceasing for you”. Now, I have never been a pray without ceasing
kind of person. Perhaps I have never
found myself in a truly desperate situation.
Perhaps it is because I am still trying to control my own life. Perhaps it is because I know that prayer is
about changing my heart not God’s and I never really desired to change. As I pray more fervently here, I can
definitely confirm that prayer changes our hearts more than it does anything
else.
But back to where I was before. Every time Paul expressed love, he described
it with prayer. The connection he formed
between himself and those he didn’t know was somehow linked to prayer. And this thought stuck in my mind like it was
super glued there. I finally realized,
the best way to love people is to pray for them. To spend time before the Lord over them would
change my heart for them. But how this
applied to my marriage was a fight I had to have first. I knew what God was trying to teach me. That if I wanted to love my husband, I would
need to deliberately lift him up in prayer and give him and our marriage over
to the Lord. The only thing that could
connect us over the distance was going to have to happen at a higher level than
we can handle. But I didn’t want to let
go. I didn’t want to leave the situation
to the Lord, I wanted to control it. I
wanted to keep my marriage exactly where it was and control it. I was already making elaborate communication
plans and I wasn’t going to miss a second in my husband’s life.
The further I planned, the more I realized it wasn’t going
to work. There is nothing I can do to
keep my husband safe back home just like there is nothing he can do to keep me
safe here. And I would have to be on the
phone with him all day and night to keep up with his life and he with
mine. It wasn’t going to work. And God already knew it and had given me the
answer. I needed to give my husband and
my marriage over to God and trust him to manage it. I had to have enough faith that God knew
better than me; which should be much easier to admit than it ever ends up
being.
But part of my struggle with giving it to God was accepting
that it wasn’t going to be what I wanted, or thought I wanted. I knew that by giving my marriage over to God
meant accepting whatever he had for it and trusting that it would be good and
for my best. And more than anything, it
meant accepting God’s promises are true.
When Kevin and I first got married, I remember being told
that if we both sought the Lord first in all of our circumstances that we would
have the strongest marriage. What I had
really been doing was putting my marriage first. I was more concerned with making sure I had a
good marriage than I was concerned about my relationship with the Lord. I wanted to make sure that Kevin and I were
growing closer together and then generally more towards God instead of the
other way around.
When I gave control over to the Lord, I acknowledged I would
have to give that up and just run towards him.
This is really why I have set very specific goals for myself and for my
improvement. It is why I have been
praying and reading my bible every day.
It is why I engaged in spiritual conversations frequently and go to
church and bible study. It’s why I am
attempting to memorize verses and put the Lord first in my actions. I am in a dead sprint to finish my race well
and I have accepted this race doesn’t end in November with this
deployment.
I have placed my faith and trust in the Lord. I have accepted that God has everything in
control. This has given me more freedom
than I have ever known. I am without
anxiety or worry. I can trust in God’s
providence to get me through and back home to my husband. I trust that God’s word is true and he only
wants the finer things for me. And I
know that Kevin and I don’t have the marriage we did. We have lost something amazing. But as we both move more intentionally
towards the Lord, we are growing together in a way that we cannot see. When I get back home, Kevin and I will have a
second honeymoon of sorts. Our marriage
will feel new to us again and we will continue from there. Because we have both moved fervently towards
the Lord, we will make leaps and bounds in our marriage when I return. I understand that this is because I don’t
have a contract of marriage with my husband.
I have a covenant between my husband, myself and the Lord, and the
latter is what holds it together. Our
newfound reliance on the Lord will renew our marriage in a way that nothing
else could. And though I do not know
what that will look like yet, I have faith and trust that it will be good. My expectations have changed based on my faith
in God’s promises.
And though sometimes, I know that my concern over my
marriage may look like apathy to some, nonchalance to others, and everything in
between. But what those people have
missed is that my love for my God and my husband exceeds their
understanding. That love is deeper than
anyone knows, but I hold it out for the Lord with an open hand. There was a point in my life when I was
concerned I would lose my faith if God ever took my husband from me. Now I am pretty sure that I would be
devastated for the loss, but I could still move towards God to supply my
comfort and strength. I am not sure I
could handle it as well as Job, but I would make it through.
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