It is ONE in the morning and while I should be sleeping…I am missing my husband.


He is spending a long weekend in the Bahamas celebrating the marriage of his younger sister Rachel. We wish we all could have gone to share in her beautiful day but it was just not logistically or financially possible. We are so excited for Rachel & Phil and very thankful that Paul could go and be with his family!

That being said….it was hard to let him go!! Our family is slowly processing the events of our life over the past year! Not understanding that daddy is only gone for a long weekend, the girls are asking what we are going to put in his care package and if they can mail daddy a letter. We have had very little opportunity to decompress the pressure cooker our lives were placed into one year ago. Writing about it has felt overwhelming as how does one adequately describe the journey that we have been on with words? Since I have received many requests to put my thoughts on paper (albeit virtual paper) regarding our deployment experience ~ I’ve decided that this bout of insomnia is as good a place to start as any….so, here goes:

Deployment. We always knew that it was looming on the horizon. We knew the closer Paul got to completing his Internal Medicine residency, the closer we were to the day that he would have to leave. But, knowing and walking are 2 very different things.
 How do families do this without a Savior?

Having lived through medical residency, I was no stranger to Paul being rather absent from our daily humdrum. If he wasn’t at the hospital, his nose was pressed into a book (and not for pleasure reading). Don’t get me wrong – the man was amazingly present considering that he was both saving lives and cramming his brain full of all sorts of medical facts and what not (look, that is about as technical as I can get seeing that the last real biology class I’ve had was freshman year of college). But family dinners with dad were more the exception than the rule and we can count on one hand how many date nights we were able to have over the last 4 years. It goes without saying that Paul is a wonderful husband and father!! Despite his crazy schedule, we created WONDERFUL memories together and took FULL advantage of the times off that Paul did have. None the less, it seemed that the past four years had prepared us (to some degree) for Paul being overseas. What I was not prepared for was the unbelievable broken heartedness that I experienced. My partner was gone and my heart was crushed. It was truly like experiencing a death without the actual death and yet there was always the ever looming possibility of word that your loved one would not return.

The walk with our Savior had taken a crazy turn and the road became unfamiliar. The path was steeper and full of twists & turns. And, while it seemed all light around us had been extinguished (as though we had entered some sort of crazy plopped-into-the-middle-of-your-life tunnel) the light on the path intensified so that we could see just enough for the day we were on.

The more we surrendered, the more we were carried...and thus the journey began.

“For we walk by faith and not by sight” 2 Corinthians 5:7

Two weeks after Paul left we received quite the surprise…I’m pretty sure my exact words were:

“you have GOT to be KIDDING me!”.

Of course, sitting on this end of things, I can’t imagine life without our sweet bundle of joy! But at the time, solo parenting 3 little girls age 5 and under seemed a mountainous task enough and the thought of doing it while pregnant just took the wind right out of my sails! Sweet Paul sent me flowers upon hearing the news and gently reminded me that “every good and perfect gift comes from above” (James 1:17).

God does indeed desire for us the very best and this was news of a blessing!! At this point, I would love to leave you with the impression that my response was an immediate “yes and Amen!” but truth must be told and the truth is: well, it took a little bit longer for me to adjust to the shock. When Paul and I first learned of his deployment, God placed the following verse upon our hearts:
“Be joyful always; pray continually; give thanks in all circumstances, for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus” (1 Thessalonians 5:16).
Little did I know He would be testing my heart’s response to this verse so soon!

Looking back, I am humbled and once again awe struck at our Amazing Heavenly Father. I’m not sure I could have survived deployment without that pregnancy. God knew a growing little one inside would keep me going while Paul was gone. Once again, I was reminded that His ways are perfect and His plans are far better than ours.

“For my thoughts are not your thoughts neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord. As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.” Isaiah 55:8-9.

I’ll leave here as the insomnia is wearing off and I’ve certainly written more than enough for one blog post. The beautiful thing about blogging is that you can post snippets of thought trails and return to them later on or not at all. As I am able, I will pick up and post on this topic again. For now, I’m off to Dreamland!