Deployment ... Or where I tell you the truth. ~ The Grace Between

Deployment … Or where I tell you the truth.

{Preamble: I’m feeling a little raw tonight. I mean, after eight plus years of marriage, four deployments, six moves, five pregnancies, three kids, I picked now to start comfort eating. Maybe it was adding Second Son. Maybe it’s the impending deployment staring me in the eyes and shouting at me from the calendar. Maybe it’s the loved one in the fight of her life. Maybe it’s just … life, happening around me at warp speed and slow ticks all the same time.

Whatever the reason, the result is a raw, achy soul. And my fingers itching to bandage it here, by pouring out my heart. 

And what I want to tell you about, what I’ve hesitated to write about because it feels somewhat unnecessarily dramatic and Lifetime Movie Network-ish, is how I prepare for the upcoming deployment. But you know, it’s what I’ve been thinking about NONSTOP for a week. Welcome to my life. It’s insane. Actually, that should probably read “I’m insane.”}

One of my best friends for going on 21 years now asked me the other day how I was preparing for this next deployment.

I have stock answers to that question. I’m lining up childcare. We are updating the wills. Updating our budget. Planning our pre-deployment family vacation. Making videos and planning all the ways our children can still know their daddy. {Editor’s note: That part STINKS.} Learning how to make cake-in-a-jar. You know, the usual.

I can do the details in my sleep. I live for the details. It’s how I block out the non-details. The impending goodbyes. The six year old wails for Daddy every time she is sick, or sad. The half-empty queen size bed. Our center of gravity, abruptly, rapidly removed.

So, those are the automatic responses. Rote, routine, second nature. And deliberately designed to reassure, to minimize. Not to shock. Because you want to know what I am really preparing for?

Him not coming home. Ever. 

Here’s what I think about incessantly: Who is the first person I will call if he dies? What will I say to our babes when I see two uniforms through the wavy leaded glass of our front door? What will become of us, this family who isn’t us without him?

Too dramatic? Because I have a whole plan. A detailed plan. That I think about probably more than I should.

Not because I believe it WILL happen … Just because I know it CAN.

This is the life we live … normal is discussing at a picnic whether or not our children will know their fathers when they come home from war. What to do if they don’t. We prepare for awful, ugly things, and then plead desperately with the Lord to prevent them from happening. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t.

These preparations, and the surrendering, and the pleading-when I let my guard down, even for a minute, they leave me weary, exhausted, worn.

Why am I telling you all this? Because redemption always has a story to tell … and even this, this ugly planning, this fear, is redeemed by Truth … I would have lost heart, unless I had believed that I would see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living (Psalm 27:13, NKJV). 

I believe that I will see the goodness of the Lord no matter the circumstance because I have. Again and again, in darkness, and in light. In grief, and in joy. In loss, and in new life.

And I know, at the end of the day, literally, when I crawl into the bed, He is still my Savior, my Sovereign King who works all things for the good of those who love Him, whose strength is made perfect in my weakness, and who, two thousand and some odd years ago, defeated death. 

And friends, those words are Truth hard fought from dark valleys and deep wells.

{Even today the tears were flowing again … }

So I will plan for the worst, plead for the best, and whisper it all to the Namer and Counter of Stars, who loves me. Me. 

{And still, of course, I will wink at the Husband from across the room and hold his hand a little tighter in church.}

Thanks for listening.

~M.

{Linking up with #TellHisStory}.

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