Days away from our first wedding anniversary and more than ten months into Joe’s deployment, we were looking forward to him being home soon. When the phone rang, I thought he was calling to wish me a happy anniversary.
I was wrong. He was being extended. Again.
Originally he was not to have been gone longer than six months. Six months turned into a year and now it looked like it would be even more than a year and half. How long? No idea. Troops were short. Nerves that were already frayed and worn snapped. I don’t remember anything about the rest of that day or the coming days.
I had never felt so out of control in my life. At that moment all of the will and positive thoughts and faith seemed to come to a halt. I felt like I was at my rope’s end just dangling out over an abyss that I had no hope of crawling out of. My first year of marriage was an utter disappointment. I was so angry. I felt robbed and abandoned. It was the darkest time in my life. I had no way of knowing when I would ever again see the man I loved. Already he felt like a distant memory; holding onto him was harder and harder each day.
That day a very hard lesson was learned. It was not about my strength, I had obviously failed. The motivation that kept me going had to come from somewhere else anywhere else because I was not able to supply needed strength any longer. It was during that time that I learned what it truly meant to rely on God. In the darkest, hardest, and most unsure moments, God was there. In the frustrations he was there. In the uncertainty he was there. And I lived through it because he was there.
Father, help me draw strength from you even in my most helpless state.
“God has said, ‘Never will I leave you; never will I forsake you.’ So we say with confidence, ‘The Lord is my helper; I will not be afraid…” (Hebrews 13:5b–6)