Seek Peace and Pursue It
Many years ago, a girl was born to a large family. She grew up surrounded by people who gave of themselves freely, and she learned how simple it was to touch someone and be a blessing simply from doing life together.
She watched her parents’ selfless care of family in their end days, loving them through the ravages of old age.
She watched her grandparents love beyond blood ties, taking people in right and left regardless of their social status, spiritual status, or race to make sure they had a place to stay, clothes to wear, food in their stomachs, and a holiday meal away from home.
She watched her church family as they guided her and encouraged her and showed her what a little slice of heaven can be like on this earthly side.
She watched how people were kind, how their call to love one another and be kind was so ingrained it was never something to think about, just something to be done.
She watched and saw the joy of walking through life, holding people close and nurturing them.
She saw and wanted that kind of life desperately for herself.
Sisterhood
Twenty-two years of life passed this way, and she married a man, with the same love of hospitality and doing life with people no matter their circumstances. He was tied to the Air Force and marriage to him had all the many adventures that life promised. Before she left her hometown for far-away places, another military spouse and church friend gave her a poem called Sisterhood, author unknown. It was a printout on thin paper, and simply framed. At every stop on the map of military changes, the poem took pride of place, reminding the young woman what this life would be like, and that there would be blessings in the mix of the adventures, the stresses, the ups, the downs, the flying, and the trudging. She soon found herself at the first official stop, the first physical address to call home and create for herself and her husband.
The sisterhood of this poem was real, and she was profoundly blessed by the military spouses and church women that gathered around to offer a shoulder, wise words, and thrilled to do life with her—even if it was for one short year of this new married military life. Those women, their love, and lessons would follow her wherever she went. This new life taught her that you could love someone no matter where they are in life, that her grandparents were right about family not having to be limited to blood relation and that hospitality should be a given, and that you can invest time and energy in someone even if you will only know them a short period of time. She learned it takes so very little to touch someone for a lifetime.
That brief year among such Godly, beautiful women set the tone for how life would be lived from then on. Then came more TLQs, hotels, a duplex, and finally a new home in an area not highly populated by active-duty military. This stop, however, came with a church full of people who snapped her and her husband up and called them theirs from the moment they opened the door that first Sunday. Those people were there for her during the TDYs, the long deployments, the short deployments, the “bring me my bag I’m leaving tonight” deployments.
They were there during the brief foray into civilian life and the retreat back to a full-time military life. They were the Every-Sunday lunch crew, the Friday and Saturday night gamers, the shopping buddies, the road trip takers, the Tuesday night chatters, the Wednesday night after church parking lot chatters, and the ones who helped tack our roots to the floor—sometimes literally. They were oftentimes the first ones see and measure the growing, pregnant belly, the first ones to know another Air Force brat had been added to the family, the first to hold the babies, and the first people her children would know and love.
They were many times the only glue holding the woman together as they reached out their arms and their lives to surround her family. The lessons learned here grew from the first of her life experiences; that strangers can become everything because they shared the common motto of “Home is togetherness.”
The years slipped by and the woman, now several years older, knew that as much as she dreaded it, change was in the air. She had approached life changes head-on so many times that it was almost second nature to do so when the time came to move halfway across the country. In terms of military moves, it seemed fairly cut and dry, but that year seemed to be the worst year of her life.
More life changes
The move date was set for March, and then 2015 began. In January, she held her family as they grieved the loss of their dog who had been with them since she was pregnant with their first child. The puppy had grown up alongside each additional kid, finally looking disinterested and slightly annoyed after the fourth child came home. It was the loss of family.
February saw the ten-day trip, many states away, to find a new house, and a return trip to find their home frozen, burst pipes and radiators, and ruined walls, ceilings, and floors, in a northeastern winter. The church family held the family together… a place to stay, a helping hand, a shoulder or six to cry on. The nightmare continued from a hotel room: uncaring insurance agents, work being done in the house, prepping for a move, holding back the heartbreak of the emotional tidal wave of leaving the blessings made over the years. There was no good in this goodbye.
March brought a partial move as the husband’s start date was some thirty days before the moving truck, but the permanent move of her family away from the long-held blessings. April was the official move of worldly goods, and May the tentative attempts at putting down roots.
June was a return to the old house because some kids broke into it and vandalized it. The church family swarmed in to help put it to rights. The woman was overwrought as it seemed life kept charging forward, pulling, dragging through the thickest sludge. By the time autumn of that year rolled around, she was in no way emotionally ready or able to set down roots. She has a photograph of herself that she hangs onto because the hurt in her eyes and the shadows on her face are the visible signs that life was hard.
The emotional trauma burned her in ways she still struggles with. The blessings were, at times, hard to see as she stumbled through the fog of change, but they were there even when her world had shrunk so intensely. She still had her husband, and children, and the business of doing life with them. There was also the realization that no matter how far away you are physically from those you love they are still a phone call away. She learned that there is also relief in taking life one day, one moment, one second at a time.
Seeking Peace
It took a while, but life settled into new patterns, dotted with new faces, but the longing for what was took on its own sort of grief for the woman. Her ideas about life had been settled, her expectations of others, grown up out of her experiences with family, military spouses, and church family, failed. There was this persistent feeling that her new life was vastly different, and the longer she was away from her last stop on the map, the more “other life” it felt. Her local area felt stilted and unaccustomed to a family unable to trace their heritage back locally for generations, or to have what they perceived as a “normal” life. Many were the phone calls to those who had blessed her life—those who understood, who knew her and the life she had had up to that point.
The things this woman had learned in her life seemed not to work. A couple of years went by, and the trauma of 2015 began to wear off enough that the woman felt she could move forward and tentatively give things a try in this new area on the map. It was all still a bit weird, and people were not open to new relationships or sharing life with people that didn’t fit the local mold of expectations.
The husband was gone for a year to various locales for training, and so she traveled more, far and wide—open to new experiences and sharing them with her children. She found some solace in a new homeschool group and found a place for herself and her family in those activities. It was vastly different than any way she had lived up to then.
She was involved in a co-op of homeschool classes and found herself teaching junior high and high school history and literature. She was a sports mom, hauling children to volleyball, basketball, soccer, and flag football. She hauled friends’ kids to the sports fields and took them on field trips.
She found friendship in a select few people, and she learned the blessing in being less rigid in her expectations, letting go of some of her preconceived notions of life, of holding the few close, and making the choice to not be embittered by change. She learned that sometimes it takes effort to recognize blessings even when she couldn’t find the blessings she had had in a previous life on a different map.
Being Intentional
A new year came around, and things had finally moved into a decent pattern. She still dealt with the emotional fallout of the move and the adjustment of what she wanted life to look like as opposed to the reality of what was available. Disappointment seemed to wallow in her thoughts, but she looked 2019 in the eye and told herself that for that year, she would strive to live with intention. She had spent so many years being bolstered by others, that she had forgotten how to live intentionally.
She was done with life dragging her willy-nilly. Then 2019 laughed, and God had a good chuckle, and she found herself with pre-teen daughters, and one of those daughters who was put in an unfortunate bullying situation without adult support. Her own emotional fallout was exceptionally hard to stomach, as she watched her daughter grieve under the injustices that should never happen to a thirteen-year-old girl, and as she grieved over a situation she had not protected her daughter from.
There was also a massive upset to the homeschool group, the one place she had felt safe in since the move, and there was slander against her own character among local families simply because she was new and no one could vouch for her. Injustice made seeing the blessings difficult. Those injustices follow her and her daughter, the long-reaching consequences as yet unknown.
The knowledge that there were still many people who loved her and her family, even a distance away, kept her sane as she relayed what life had dealt her that summer. She found herself brought closer to women who were going through the same struggles. She found they had the same values and wanted the same things she did for her family. Oftentimes she was reminded of God’s faithfulness even as humanity continued to fail her and her family. It’s a blessing to know that God does not fail us.
Four other family members came down with the same sickness, and two days after her hospital stay, her oldest daughter went into the hospital for eight days for pneumonia. In all their years together as a family, they had never had to deal with health conditions or sickness of this severity. The final sick case in the family began February 1st. Hindsight literally 2020, her family was likely struck early by coronavirus.
Searching for kindness and understanding
By the time the family had peeked out into the world for a couple of weeks and started their new year, the world ground to a halt. The ugliness and division of 2020 shook this woman to the core. There was grief, so much grief. The world had gone mad. Those she held close to her heart over the many years turned on each other and turned on her.
Suddenly she was in the spotlight for homeschooling, many calling her or texting her for help in the overwhelming world of having homeschooling thrust upon them—a decision she and other veteran homeschoolers weighed carefully and planned for in stark contrast to the desperate, anxiety laden attempts to homeschool by people who never chose it for themselves. Suddenly she was also in the spotlight for being “privileged” to have made the decision years ago and was invalidated as someone who would not struggle with everything shut down because she was “used to staying home and not going anywhere.” The gross ignorance of so many people over the course of the year tore at her heart.
As long as someone else’s soap box was taller and more righteous and was perceived as more godly or spiritual seemed to be the goal. The lack of kindness and compassion strained her for it went against everything she had ever known. She also continued to have health problems– shortness of breath, fatigue, brain fog, and a near recurrence of pneumonia. While she struggled to breathe, others died from lack of breathing and many others mocked the idea that masks were helpful. She watched and stayed home for lack of kindness and understanding and grieved, as month after month of lung aches and difficulty breathing plagued her days.
If anything, 2020 was the year of invalidation. Relationships fell apart over differences of opinion, over politics, over righteous indignation, over misinformation, and she felt it all keenly and slowly cleansed her newsfeeds and her life of the anger and ugly. She had learned to lower her expectations of life and now people expected her to jump on the latest bandwagon, saying it was her spiritual duty.
She decided that her spiritual duty had called her to kindness and understanding. It shocked her to discover those who would have agreed with her prior to 2020 were caught up in it all. The whole year felt wrongfooted and she retreated into her home, unable to deal with any more emotional upset than necessary.
She found the desire return to make her house her home, to put down her roots. She had long known this would be her last stop along the map of military change but couldn’t bring herself to make it look like that. She had never really settled in her house fully. She found blessings in the painting of the walls, of nailing her pictures to the wall, decorating with treasures that had not seen the light of day since the move five years prior. She planted flowers and filled her home with an assortment of plants, searching for meaning in her world as the rest of the world seemingly stopped and flailed.
Pursuing Peace
She has always been optimistic, but life at times made it hard. She found solace in her smaller life, her children nearby and underfoot, her homeschooling without the extracurriculars and teenage daughters aching to go and do and be, and her peaceful household. She mulled over the kind of people she had been blessed with along her journey and decided that she needed to be that for others. She honored those who touched her life, and grieved aplenty at their loss in 2020. She realized that for every stage of life we have different blessings. We start out as young children thanking God in our childish prayers for those things that are tangible— our parents, our siblings, our house, our food, our grandparents– mainly for what we have received.
As we get older, we begin to realize that it is our honor to be a blessing to others and to carry that forward with us. We have a legacy that began well before we were part of this world, and it continued down to us. If God’s grace and love and blessings are boundless, why are we so stingy with ours?
Now, it is our turn to be welcoming, to offer love and friendship, and to use our experiences to see past the differences and the pervading offensiveness of this day and age. We were called to be Light, to be love, to be kindness, and to be peace. We were called to be a blessing to those around us no matter who they are, what they believe, or where they are physically or spiritually in this life.
“Finally, all of you, be likeminded, be sympathetic, love one another, be compassionate and humble. Do not repay evil with evil or insult with insult. On the contrary, repay evil with blessing, because to this you were called so that you may inherit a blessing. For ‘Whoever would love life and see good days must keep their tongue from evil and their lips from deceitful speech. They must turn from evil and do good; they must seek peace and pursue it. For the eyes of the Lord are on the righteous and his ears are attentive to their prayer, but the face of the Lord is against those who do evil.’ Who is going to harm you if you are eager to do good? But even if you should suffer for what is right, you are blessed.” I Peter 3:8-14
