I opened my eyes. The first sounds I heard were those of a muezzin, high in the minaret, calling the people to prayer. Although foreign to my ears, the chanting seemed right for the moment. . . .as I was in Turkey, amongst the Muslim people ... My husband was still sleeping as I got up and went to the window. He was serving a remote tour to Turkey in 1985, and I was visiting—away from our five boys at home. There was a small balcony off our room and I wanted to see the village at dawn. The quiet was mesmerizing.

Several military wives, myself included, had crammed into an apartment living room for a book club meeting. As we chatted between bites of crackers and cheese, our conversation veered away from the book of the month when the hostess unleashed a bitter monologue concerning her husband’s frequent absences at sea and punctuated it with a booming, “I did not sign up to be a single parent!” With one toddler and another baby due soon, this woman was clearly frazzled. Unfortunately, her resentment over having to be solo spilled out of her like a toxin and threatened to poison the evening.

Have you ever PCSed and had the realtor tell you that the most important thing to consider in choosing a house is “location . . . location . . . location”? In his book, Dangerous Calling, Paul David Tripp says that phrase also refers to life. When I read that statement I was intrigued.

“Identity Crisis” is a long devotion—one of the longest we have posted.  Knowing your ops tempo we are surprised when the numbers come in as to its popularity.  That speaks to us of the need for spiritual material dealing with growth during deployment, and we are grateful to God.We were already planning on a follow-up piece using JJ Heller’s “What Love Really Means.”  So we post it tonight with joy and anticipation for how God is going to use it to affirm you in your spiritual walk with Him during this time of war:

Because of the rigors of deployment and the struggles of life, have you started asking yourself, “Who am I anymore?”Perhaps you can call that an “identity crisis”—when you begin to question or contemplate or doubt what makes you important or what makes you worthwhile.Many people tie their importance or identity to a number of different things: career progression, relationships, checkbook & savings balance, housing, car, what parents or spouse or sibling or supervisor or physical appearance or even the past says about them.What is the major problem with this list? It leaves out God and what He has to say about who you are.