Sara Horn - God Strong: The Military Wifes Spiritual Survival Guide

ZONDERVAN

God Strong

Copyright 2010 by Sara Horn

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ePub Edition December 2009 ISBN: 978-0-310-39571-3

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Horn, Sara, 1977

God strong : the military wifes spiritual survival guide / Sara Horn.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 978-0-310-29402-3 (softcover)

1. WivesReligious life. 2. Christian womenReligious life. 3. Military spousesReligious life. I. Title.

BV4528.15.H67 2010

248.8435088355dc22 2009032593

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Interior design: Matthew Van Zomeren

To every military wife who has ever asked,
How can I do this?

God said this once and for all;

how many times

Have I heard it repeated?

Strength comes

Straight from God.

Psalm 62:11

But my peopleoh, Ill make them strong, GOD-strong!
and theyll live my way. GOD says so!

Zechariah 10:12

THE DIFFERENCE
ONE WORD MAKES

IF STRENGTH IS SYMBOLIZED BY COLOR, the summer of 2007 I would have been invisible. That was the midway point of my husbands first deployment to Iraq, and a crumpled-up piece of paper in my wastebasket had more strength than I did at the time.

The Fourth of July had arrived and I was alone. All my friends had decided to go out of town that week, and so it was just my little boy and me, and I didnt want to do anything. While other families were out grilling in their back yards and enjoying the holiday, I was missing my husband, Cliff, and ruefully thinking about how our familys sacrifice was giving other families the chance to carry on with their carefree lives. I tried to put on a brave face for our son, but that day, it wasnt working very well. So I sent Caleb out to play in the bright sunshine with the neighbor kids while I sat on my couch with the curtains closed staring blankly at nothing in particular. I was done. I was worn out. I had nothing left to give. I tried to pray, but even that was hard.

Just a little over a year before, I sat in that exact same spot, thinking about the news Cliff had called with from his AT (annual training). His Navy Reserve Seabee battalion would deploy at the beginning of 2007.

At the time, I was very optimistic about and even motivated by the deployment. Cliff had been in the Navy Reserves for a little over ten years, but I had never really felt like a true military wife. I didnt buy our groceries at the commissary; Cliff didnt wear his camouflage to work every day. In fact, my husbands Reserve center was in Millington, near Memphis, almost four hours from where we lived in Nashville. I could count on one hand the number of times Id visited the base with him on a drill weekend during his first decade of service. Id never met Cliffs commanding officer, never attended any special ceremonies or worried about any military formalities.

For our family, military life was never really the norm. We got used to the one weekend a month, two weeks a year that Cliff was gone to Navy, as our little boy called it, and we liked the little bit of extra paycheck that came with it, but for the most part, Cliffs service as a reservist was never really part of our familys day-to-day. Until it interfered with a birthday or an anniversary or some other special event; in those cases, we definitely had something in common with active military.

Only when I traveled twice to Iraq in 2003 to cover stories of Christians in the military did I finally get a glimpse of what it means to be in the military, what it means for the families and spouses back home. I interviewed both service members and their families and wrote stories about how families can stay connected, how God can give hope in stressful times, and how service members can keep their faith strong. I shared with my readers the ups and downs of deployment and the difficult challenges faced by military wives when they had to watch their husbands leave to fight a war. I admired the wives quiet strength, their resilience, and their commitment to their husbands and their families through extremely tough circumstances. When we got word about our own deployment, I wondered if I could be like those wives Id gotten to know. At the time, it felt like I was about to play dress-up, wearing a costume that wasnt made for me.

But now, fifteen months later, I definitely felt like a military wife. I knew what it was like to carry my cell phone with me everywhere, including to bed; I watched the news and wondered if my husband was in the area where they were reporting violence; I knew the pain of sitting by myself at church and feeling completely alone in a room filled with people; I sometimes cried when I saw a soldier in uniform; I knew what it was like to force myself to answer with a pleasant Im good when someone asked me how I was doing, knowing they didnt want to hear how I really felt.

But sitting on the couch that day, worn out, spent, and ready to quit with no clear idea how I could do that, I came to another realization: that the strength Id run on for so long was only my own and that already seven months into the deployment, I was missing what God was trying to teach me. That