I did some vehicle recovery training early in my military career. I don’t remember much of it other than this one exercise where the instructors drove an M113 Armored Personnel Carrier into a swamp and told us to drag it out using some ropes, pulleys, ground anchors and get this---a hand winch! An M113 weighs around 10 tons and this one was down a bank and in the mud. The winch was rated for 2 tons! We followed the instructor’s directions and set up a series of ropes running through pulleys and anchored to solid ground at the other end. The pulley was then attached to the end of another rope and so on. The theory was that each pulley/rope/ground anchor we set up doubled the weight we could pull because the ground anchors would take half the weight.

I sat in our Bible study and watched another woman share a prayer request. She was having a hard time dealing with the fact that her parents and sister’s family had moved across the country. After years of living in the same small town of Homer, Alaska, this woman missed them terribly and was growing bitter about it. As I listened to her share with broken voice and many tears, I’m ashamed to admit I had no compassion for her whatsoever. The first thing that jumped into my mind was, “You call that bad? Try being a military wife! We hardly ever get to live near our extended families. We don’t even live with our own husbands half the time!”

Have you ever been angry with the Army (insert your own service here) at some point? Is it because of back-to-back deployments, a tough duty station, dealing with PTSD, combat operational stress, an injured husband/wife, the death of a spouse or a friend’s spouse, children or dogs who act up because Daddy/Mommy has been away too long? If angry, are you perhaps serving in the wrong Army? The Lord wants us in His Army, not just in the U.S. Army.