All families today are under stress but none as much as military families. They live with the constant pressure of deployments around the world, not knowing from one month to the next if their husband or wife will be sent off to some dangerous part of the world for weeks or even months. It’s not a normal way to live.
Many military families prosper
But somehow—against all odds—many military families find a way not just to get through the pressure but also to prosper in the middle of it. None of them would say they’re perfect or that they always handle their situation as well as they should. What they’d say instead is that their faith is the reason they’re able to stay together. My wife and I have front row seats to two young military families doing just that.
Last week I loaded my son Will, his wife and their two small children on a plane to move to their new duty station on the west coast. He’s in the Army and after a decade of education and training is beginning his new life on the front lines in a hard area of the world. Like so many others, he’ll spend the next few years traveling back and forth between his home in America and a distant country so brutal and dangerous that the rest of us can’t imagine it. The last sight I had of him and his family walking into the airport was one I’ll carry with me for the rest of my life. Here’s a previous post on “Four Keys to Making It through Your Child’s Deployment.”
It’s not just Will and his family who were on my mind. Even as I waved goodbye to him, my wife was with our daughter and her two small children. They’re also a military family and, like her brother’s family, also stationed on the west coast. My wife had gone out there to help with their new baby since my daughter’s husband was deployed.
But even as Pam and I try to figure out what it means to have all our family 3000 miles away, we have a sense of peace about it all. One reason is that we and they are convinced that they’re in the very center of God’s will. Another reason is that we’re confident of their faith.
Our situation isn’t unique. Military families everywhere are strained by the rapid rate of deployment and exhausted by the wear and tear on relationships that modern military service brings. But like our two children, many of them find a way to stay together.
Their families pay a high price for their service
All the military people I know—and I know lots of them—are proud to serve and are without fail dedicated professionals. But their families pay a high price for their service. It’s a costly thing when a young husband is gone so much that he measures his family not by the birthdays, vacations or graduations he attends but instead by those he misses. It’s an expensive experience for a man and his wife to be nurtured in their marriage when they’re apart more than with one another–if love is defined by time spent together, how do you make it work when time is so short?
Many military families don’t survive. Divorce is an everyday occurrence. Some marriages stay together in name only, with the extended periods of separation prove and obstacle to great to overcome. Others become so filled with conflict that they lose all joy.
Faith is a force strong enough to keep families together
But a few families—more than we realize—are able to overcome the forces trying to tear them apart because of a greater force keeping them together, something Pam and I have witnessed with our grown children. Military families with a vibrant faith in Jesus have a center to their lives strong and cohesive enough to keep them together through whatever deployments, separations and distance their careers may bring.
As a dad, I’m happy to see my grown children functioning at such a high and mature level in their lives. But it gives me even more joy to see that their faith–like the faith of so many other young military families–isn’t just lip service. It’s a real relationship with Jesus that reveals itself in their ability to deal with the challenges of military service.
As a pastor, though, I see something more. Whether military or civilian, the challenges to marriage in today’s world are such that we all need the same kind of faith. A faith that isn’t just the reflection of our parents’ faith but the integration of our personal experience into our present circumstance. A faith that sustains us when the world is uncertain and hard. A faith that’s adequate to every season of life. A faith that can hold a family together when everything else seems to be pulling it apart.
Military families have something to teach the rest of us about that kind of faith.
The image at the top is not of either of my children’s families. One of the realities of military service today is the need for security in social media and the internet.