In the last pages of What Did You Expect?? Paul David Tripp summarizes his writing with this: “What has this book been about? It has been a detailed description of the daily work of love that must be done with commitment and joy when a flawed person is married to a flawed person and they are living in a fallen world." Did you catch that—“Daily work . . . So how do you do that under the challenge of deployment?
She was a strong woman. Perhaps that came from being the oldest of seven—no doubt a rowdy bunch. Perhaps it came from growing up during The Great Depression and having to work hard at home. Perhaps it came from having two pretty strict parents who expected a lot from their kids. She was strong even in the days when it wasn’t the “norm” to be a strong woman.
Year after year I saw my mother putting a copy of a “Prayer for a Bride and Groom” into an envelope and sending it as a wedding gift to some young couple whom she knew. I didn’t pay much attention. I knew it was a special prayer she had found in a magazine years ago, and had made many copies so as to be ready to send it when she would get a wedding invitation. Then it was time for my own children to get married, and out came the copy of the prayer as her gift. This time I paid attention.
A friend in North Carolina introduced me to “standing for your marriage” as a concept and movement. I had always known there were those who refused to give up on their dying or dead marriage—but I had never heard it called “standing”. Since then I have paid close attention to articles, books, websites, testimonies, and seminars about standing. I know in the military community the stresses on a marriage can cause either the husband or wife—sometimes both—to say, “Enough! I’m done!”
Disagreements are a natural part of marriage. We should always try to resolve them gently and quickly, but it is also very human of us to let things go on for longer than they should. And if we leave it too long, the strong desire to blame the other person for all our problems can become a habit–and then a constant part of our relationship. This entrenched and hostile blaming is bitterness.
“I’m not there! What can I do about it?” If you’ve ever heard those words from a deployed service member, you know the frustration they offer up to the one at home having to deal with the troubling situation. If the situation regards the rearing of children, then the frustration can reach epic proportions. None of us wants that, right? So here are some thoughts to help—they’re so simple we call them the "ABCs" of long-distance parenting.
In just about every artistic rendering of a soldier’s homecoming, be it a song, a movie or a television commercial, we are left with an emotional high that tells us all is well again. But if military wives assume their reunion with their husbands is a fairytale ending to their separation, disappointment is almost sure to set in. “I have seen way too many military wives build up a fantasy in their minds about what life will be like once their husbands are home—and then be destroyed when this fantasy was not a reality,” says National Guard wife
Growing up the daughter of a submariner, I was always fascinated by the raw beauty and power of the sea. Its proximity was partly to blame; until I went off to college, I had never lived in a land-locked place. The other reality that inspired my awe, however, was that the ocean was my father’s livelihood. Even as he knew how to navigate and operate within it, he lived constantly at its mercy.
For me, the story of “Taps” is a local story because I live close to where it was composed. I could easily drive to Berkeley Plantation in Virginia, where there is a monument marking the “birthplace” of Taps. Tour guides will tell you that the haunting 24-note bugle call is actually a revision of a French call to signal to the troops the end of the day and “lights out.” The story goes like this:
Our flight was delayed—eventually cancelled. The rush to get everything done with work and home in order to get out-of-town had left us exhausted, so standing in a long line to be re-routed was a bit of an exercise in patience. It would be twenty-four hours before we could catch another international flight, so we were disappointed (to say the least). But one of the ladies in front of us was crying over it all. . . .