Army: Afghanistan Number 10

Post 10: Week 13

 Ok, I know I have been slacking the last couple of weeks, but I am finally getting back to writing again.  It has been a crazy last couple of weeks.  I have been working on some big projects at work between creating a brief for our brigade commander (and eventually his boss) and working on lean six sigma.  Plus rocket attacks, lack of sleep, football games, cook outs and everything else in between.  It has been a busy couple of weeks.  Plus, it has been nearly in the 100’s around here, and with the heat has come a new form of laziness. I am not looking forward to how July will feel around here.  But, cookies from the St John’s Lutheran church, and cards from the cedar ridge elementary school and tri-valley school (from Bloomington, IL: see pictures), plus a video chat with my pen pals (a fifth grade class from Everglades Elementary School in Okeechobee, FL)  have all been refreshing to my spirit and have given me renewed strength even in this crazy heat.  But, true to my style, here I go again.

Mental: Oh Lean Six Sigma.  This has been a chore.  I have been pouring over a spreadsheet that started with over 40,000 lines of data for my measure phase.  The spreadsheet tracks how we move containers around Afghanistan to include which carriers we use and how much they get paid.  I ended up pulling 400 lines of data out of it, focusing on only the lines that had been completely filled in.  I have been paying special attention to how far something travels and how much we are paying to move it.  Our Master Black Belt (instructor) put my data into minitab (program used to create histograms, pareto charts, etc.) and I am now moving into my analyze phase.  It is hard to know what to focus on and what not to.  There seems to be a lot of things that don’t add up or don’t prove some of my original assumptions about how we move things around. 

Physical: So, as shameful as this is, I haven’t been doing much PT recently.  Any free time I have gotten has pretty much been spent relaxing.  After the last couple of days of getting 9 hours of sleep (amazing right?!), I plan on doing some yoga tomorrow morning, and starting to get back into a regular run/ workout routine so that will be good.  I have been learning to play football and am actually not bad at throwing.  My accuracy has increased a lot and I enjoy the excuse to be outside.  I also have learned what an in, out, slant and hook are.  I guess that’s what happens when you spend this much time with a bunch of guys. 

Financial: So… I may have gotten a tiny bit greedy, but not really.  I currently have one stock that is not performing where I had hoped it would and missed my target price before falling. There was another one that was in the same boat but I ended up selling it for about a 5% profit.   I haven’t lost anything  yet, but on the one I am hoping it will build up a little bit more before I sell.  I set more reasonable limits and am expecting to sell it in the next couple of days.  The hard part is knowing what to invest in next.  Fewer and fewer earnings reports are coming out and that has been my primary method of choosing.  Normally, I look at the earnings report dates and focus on stocks that have EPS greater than 1.00 and are below $30/share.  I may need to rethink this strategy as the earnings reports become scarcer but we shall see. 

Emotional: So, I wish I had something brilliant and inspiring to say on this one.  I wish I could say that I had some marvelous epiphany and had great words of wisdom to share on this one, but I don’t.  All I can say is that I still am struggling to find how to be a good wife when I am in Afghanistan.  I know I am making some progress, but it never feels tangible.  I know even blogging has not only helped my husband to see where I am at, but has made it easier for others to share with him and join in our struggle.  But at the same time, I feel absolutely torn in many directions. Having just past the 1/3 mark, the next 2/3 feels like it will take forever.  My desire to be home and move on with my life is strong and yet, I like it here.  I have found joy in my circumstances and wonder if returning to my previous distractions will take me away from that joy.  I am afraid of losing what I have gained and I am already concerned that the change won’t be lasting.  I have grown as a person immensely here, but I still don’t like change.  It is easier to maintain everything if my circumstances don’t change.  I think that is my hardest emotional struggle right now.  I feel like I am trying to run in two different directions.  I want to stay here and live in the joy I have found and I want to be home and live in the happiness of my home and my marriage and my comforts. 

Spiritual:  I have continued in my scripture readings daily.  I am trying to now read at least twice a day.  I am trying to read through the new testament again as I am reading through the old.  (The old levitical laws of throwing blood around altars still grosses me out, so I found balancing it with the new testament gives me a stronger desire to keep reading as I find the hope the new testament brings).  And my prayers have changed for the better too.  I have been trying to spend more time focusing on asking for forgiveness.  I have never been oblivious to my sin, but I have never taken the time to truly reflect on it and thank God for his mercy and forgiveness and for giving me the power to overcome any of it.  What made me realize I needed to do this was really thinking about Is loving people and wanting to love people better in all circumstances, not just when it is easy.  But I also made the connection to Luke 7:36-50.  It is when Jesus tells of how those who are forgiven little, love little and loves who are forgiven much, love much.  But the difference between those two people (those that are forgiven little and those that are forgiven much) is their attitudes.  If I am never spending time reflecting in how much I need forgiveness, or I take it for granted, I am not going to love very much.  And it is not that I need forgiveness any more or less than the next person because we all have the same need for forgiveness.  God isn’t saying that some people get more forgiveness than others.  The difference is in our attitudes towards God and our realization of how much WE need HIS forgiveness.  I need to spend more time contemplating the things I have already been forgiven for and not take for granted that fact that I am forgiven.  And when I ponder these things in my heart. I can see more and more of God’s love for me and humanity and my desire to live in joy and peace and love other’s grows exponentially.  I need to be forgiven much so that I can love much and love genuinely. 

But there is something else I have been realizing too.  Since I was 14 years old, I have pretty much always had a guy in my life.  And I have always let my faith be dictated by those men.  If they weren’t as spiritual as me, I would hinder myself to “let them catch up” and I, without realizing it, refused to grow in my relationship with the Lord without someone there to grow with.  Even as I got married, I have never wanted to strike out on my own and have my own relationship with the Lord.  I have always rather been dependent upon my husband to fill that need (which isn’t fair to him because it makes him responsible for something I am accountable for).  Since coming to Afghanistan, I am finally stepping on my own, without input really from anyone.  I am running as if to finish my race well and have grown so much since I have gotten here.  And even though I have had multiple conversations (and arguments) regarding faith and the gospel, it hasn’t really caused any growth for me.  It hasn’t encouraged me or discouraged me towards the Lord and I believe it is because he doesn’t intend for it to.  The longer I am here, the more convinced I am that God pulled me out of my comfort zone to finally teach me to rely on him first.  I couldn’t let go of that control and so he put me in the situation where I would have to.   But there are people here I could rely on for spiritual growth, this time it is only about me and Him.  I no longer feel or see a connection between any one person’s spiritual growth and my own and never have I been more FREE.  Never have I been more at peace nor found more joy in my circumstances.  And it is not that Kevin’s spiritual journey isn’t relevant to me; it is that I am no longer dependent upon it.  And my concern is that, upon returning that I would lose what I have found.  That my strength would again be found in my husband and not from God.  I want to protect what I have found and I want to keep it.  I think most people feel that way when they do mission trips (I know I did).  At the end, you don’t want to go home because you don’t want to lose the growth you found because you have never been so reliant upon him and you know that once you get home and back into your routine, you will likely lose it because you won’t have needed God in the same way that you did before. 

But, I have 6 months to figure out how to let this time change me radically and how to make it so strong and firmly apart of who I am that changing my circumstance doesn’t shake who I have become. 

Life: Trusting the Lord with my everything

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.