Working Vacation

I am back home in the cottage after a lovely extended visit with my husband. Unfortunately, since I left immediately after the end of the school year, I am facing the aftermath of the last month or so of school when it seemed like all I did was eat, sleep, and work on papers or study for tests. Of course, that was on top of the mess left when my husband moved to his new Duty Station. So it is one crazy mess here in this cozy little cottage, and I am taking one day at a time to work on it slowly. Finding places to put things that makes sense when I am busy and don't want to take a lot of time to pick up all the time.

I am realizing just how much being a bi-locational couple has turned my world upside-down. It isn't that we weren't prepared. It is simply that as much as we talked about the possibility that we would be geographically separated at least once in both of our careers nothing can prepare you for the reality of what it is like. The sense of dislocation and emptiness after a visit together. The strangeness of rearranging your apartment to fit your "alone" life instead of the way it fits when there are two of you. Even having your "alone" life and your "together" life - having to have those different parts at all.

During the school year it was easy to focus on my ministry. In this pause I am facing the reality of the Army Wife side of myself. Learning this aspect of my walk that much more clearly. I had hoped it would be all about the Future Soldier side of me; that this Summer break would be about exercise and eating well. And in some ways it is. But it is far more about learning to be a soldier's wife who is also a future soldier and not a future soldier who happens to be a soldier's wife. Funny how there is such a distinction there. It looks like a matter of word order, but it is much deeper than that.

I will always be a soldier's wife. Soon I will be soldier, and lose the "future" in front of it. Therein lies the difference. Even when I am a seasoned Chaplain ministering in the Army many years from now I will still be a soldier's wife. That is a part of my self now, a part that influences how I read the news, how I prepare for my own life as a soldier, how I pray, how I engage with community and friends.

I hadn't realized the difference it made until we had to learn to live as a geographically separated couple. I look around me and I see couples happily all over each other and I swallow a stab of jealousy that I didn't even know existed. I see them everywhere. Couples walking hand in hand through the streets, sitting together in church, filling the restaurants and coffee shops I walk past in my neighborhood. Sometimes I just want to scream. I see them talking together and I think about how I have to wait until we can find a time when we both can be on the phone if I want to have even a simple conversation with my husband. I think about the letters I write when he is out it the field and there is no contact for days and weeks at a time. The text messages that can make my heart flutter just because they are a moment of connection for us - even the ones that just say Hello.

At school I know I am not the only one who is geographically separated from their spouse/partner/spartner/significant other/whatever you choose to call your other half. We can talk about it and encourage each other through the difficult days. I know that I am lucky to have a community that is understanding and supportive through this experience. It still hurts sometimes.

There are good sides to this aspect of our life together. I am forced to be fully independent. I have to squish my own spiders, change my own light bulbs, make sure the car is maintained, do everything to make sure that life continues to run smoothly. I have to think for myself and not always talk it over with my husband before making a decision. I am learning to accept the support of the community around me and to love that community as a family in a way that I had not understood before.

When Fr. Mike pointed out that I am on a Trinitarian Path, I agreed but didn't see that all three strands of my path were equal. I thought the Army Wife path was just a thread along the side of my Army Chaplain path. It certainly wasn't much in comparison to my Seminarian path. How wrong I was. It is just as important for me to be learning and experiencing as the other two.

Where Am I?

So much has happened since I last wrote here! The semester has ended successfully, I interviewed and received my Ecclesiastical Endorsement for the Chaplain Candidate Program, and I have had a relaxing couple of weeks with my husband.

Finals week really took a lot out of me. I had been pushing to get everything completed before I flew to Washington D.C. for my interview and I barely made it. Fortunately most of my finals were take-home tests, with the exception being my New Testament final that began at 6:30 pm Tuesday night. I flew out at 6:00 Wednesday morning for D.C. and interviewed Thursday morning before flying back that afternoon so that I could be back at CDSP in time for graduation Friday morning!

When I landed I had a message from the Bishop Suffragan for Armed Services and Federal Ministries saying that he was glad to give me the Endorsement to enter the Chaplain Candidate Program contingent upon meeting physical standards for entry into the Army. This is a huge hurdle for me and one that confirms to me that I am indeed moving in the right direction to fulfill the call God has placed in my life. Of course, that also means that the pressure is truly on to get my physical fitness in order!

Graduation was amazing! It is essentially a Eucharist with a graduation thrown in where we might otherwise put a Baptism or Confirmation. St. Margaret's Courtyard was beautiful, the music was inspiring, and I thoroughly enjoyed every minute of it - even though my body was quite confused as to what time zone I might have been in.

I traveled to join my husband where he has been assigned a few days after the end of school. I needed to catch my breath! I have had a lovely time here resting and catching up on research for General Convention. I am looking forward to representing CDSP there in a few weeks.

As I said, so much has been happening! With faith I am moving forward and taking it all one step at a time.

Time Flies...

Is it really just two weeks to graduation week? Oh, my. It seems like it was just a week ago that it was Holy Week madness and utter unpredictability. Now many of my big not-quite-finals-but-close projects are wrapping up and I am preparing for the end of the school year.

I still have one major paper - a 15 page doozy for History - and a presentation to create along with it, but otherwise the finals are looming.

The only upside to all of this is that I am suddenly finding a few moments within the crazy run of my days to catch my breath and enjoy the sunshine once again. Not to resent it for shining on my book-of-the-moment and blinding me in my homework reading, but to actually enjoy it. Fortunately, the sun is accommodating and is spending a significantly lower percentage of time hiding behind the clouds.

So now it is back to the research and writing, studying and memorizing, praying and running around!

Holy Week

Well, we survived Spring Break. I think. It is the morning of Monday in Holy Week and I already feel as if I have been running an exhausting marathon. Usually I feel this way Easter Morning after Holy Week. All those services and the emotional and spiritual lows and highs that go with it.

Spring Break was not particularly relaxing, nor could I call it refreshing, renewing, or even much of a break. We were away from school and out of town, but for me it was a bit like exchanging one stressful setting for another. Instead of research papers and being up to my eyeballs in reading (which faithfully traveled with me) we were researching apartment complexes and up to my eyeballs in the details of setting up a second household in a place neither one of us is familiar with. Welcome to the Army.

I shouldn't complain. We did it. Other military families do it as well. This won't be our last time, either. But the first time seems a bit more unfamiliar and confusing than any subsequent times, and so I tuck the mental notes away into the back of my mind and create a file of little things that will make the next time that much easier.

Just in time for me to return to classes, I waved my husband off very early this morning. The apartment here looks like a bomb went off; things piled randomly here and there, what seems like (but isn't) most of the furniture missing, and way more empty space than I remembered from moving in evident everywhere. It is too quiet. Not just the He's-gone-to-work-and-will-be-back-later quiet, but a different quiet. One that feels more present and somehow aware of my solitude. So as I take a deep breath and begin to try to catch up with my school work, I am also taking bits of time to tidy up, reorganize around the newly empty spaces, and rearrange the furniture so I am not just creeping around the walls but living in all of my space.

After the all-consuming experience of getting moved in just two weeks, I am remembering the why of why I am still here and not moving with my husband. School. Even though I took some reading with me, it was very distracting and rather all-consuming. I gave up after a couple of nights of theology studded with moments of "what-about-the-(fill in the blank)." I suppose that is one way to make sure your new household gets a good blessing, but it really isn't all that great for the theological development of the reader. I find I am having to re-skim so much of the homework I tried to read that it almost would have been better to leave it home. On the other hand, this experience has given me wonderful insight into my upcoming Pastoral Theology project, and I am grateful for that.

So this Holy Week I will try to remember to be gentle with myself. Not only will I be dealing with the emotional roller coaster that is the final week of Jesus' earthly life, I am also adjusting to being a geographic bachelorette. The combination makes my prayers for this week incredibly simple. Be gentle, be aware, breathe. Repeat as needed. Don't be afraid to cry if I need to. Don't make big plans for this time, and leave space for adjusting. As always, lean on God and my guardian Angels. Let them take care of me and don't try to do it all myself. Amen.

Lenten What?

Everyone talks about Lenten disciplines. You know, giving up something you enjoy like chocolate or alcohol. Maybe you take on an extra something, a daily reading or meditation time. Apparently this year I have given up discipline. Actually, it appears that a hand greater than mine has chosen this for me. To walk in chaos just when I want to embrace structure and, well, discipline.

My husband is being moved to Riverside during Holy Week. That means that yesterday I picked him up from three months of training and dragged him into the one week that we have for him to get moved. The movers come on Wednesday to pack up everything that will be going with him. That's right. He has two days to decide what gets packed from our shared household. Sure, we've already talked about things like furniture and the obvious clothing and such. But how do we separate it all out so that the movers know what to pack and what not to pack? What about the little touches that make someplace home?

We will be spending Spring Break - next week - in Riverside scoping things out. Looking at possible apartments, trying to figure out where things are. A relaxing break from theology, right? Ha. More like diving head first into a Pastoral Theology Case Study. Only without the neat answers.

I can only hope that by embracing instead of fighting all of this chaos, fitting reading, writing papers, and studying for midterms into whatever little snippet of time I can find, I will be stronger for it. I can't say that I am sure that this is good for my research papers, but we'll just have to put that in God's hands. In the meantime, I am walking this hand in hand with God knowing that this is the only way to make it through this transition. Besides, who else chose to time it this way?

Shake it Up!

Things here are on the move. Literally.

My husband left Friday morning to continue with his current students as they complete their training out in the field. This leaves me doing the logistics dance of getting his more permanent move set up. It also leaves me once again moving in and out of the dance that is balancing my school and community with taking care of myself and my own little nest. Without him here to act as an external cue my timing is off. The routine that I built up through the first part of the semester relied on him returning home at some point in the evening to remind me to stop and focus away from the computer and gave me a time frame which I could reference. Now it is all up to me, and in these first days I find that I am in a bit of a fog when it comes to recognizing how time is passing.

But God does indeed have a sense of humor. This morning I had decided to luxuriate in setting my own time to wake up. 6:30 sounded good, sleeping in by an hour or so. At 5:33 a 4.0 earthquake rattled the apartment and shook me awake. Only 15 minutes later than the time the alarm has been going off daily for the past three months. I suppose I am grateful that I was already drifting toward waking so the shock to my system wasn't any greater, but I am not generally a huge fan of earthquakes and when I am alone my mind immediately begins to think about all the things that could possibly go wrong if this turns out to be "the big one."

As Lay Assistant in our chapel today, it is my responsibility to write the Prayers of the People. I have been praying with the propers we will use: Holy Women, Holy Men, pg 42. Only a slight hope in all of the readings and much to create a "proper" Lenten sense of abasement. Daniel 9: 3-10. Psalm 79: 1-9. Luke 6:27-38. Not much there to cheer anyone up. The collect has the beautiful images of  washing "us with the pure water of repentance" and preparing "us to be always a living sacrifice to you" which I find evocative and hopeful, however.

I suspect that my upbringing has a lot to do with my lack of utter discomfort with the association of Lent with repentance, atonement, sacrifice, and preparation. I actually look forward to this as a break from the unrelenting cheerfulness that sometimes pervades the Christian outlook. While I do not particularly enjoy the reminder that I am not as perfect and holy as I sometimes like to think I am I do believe that this is a good chance to remember that my relationship with God is a two-way street. As long as I realize that I have strayed and look for God wherever I find myself God will always be looking for me. Yes, I join in the jokes about a suitably penitential Lent; but in the end I will always be grateful that there is a time to recognize my fallibility and my mistakes. I rejoice that we still gather together to acknowledge one another in our current state in life and look forward to the resurrection as a community of faith.

One of Those Days

The last week has been quite hectic, and I can barely remember more than the last day or two. My trinitarian path has been particularly difficult, and I wish that I could separate each journey to make them easier to deal with. Today would be labeled a "seminarian" day; full of papers and reading, catching up on the homework I didn't do while I had "army wife" and "future army chaplain" days.

Friday afternoon and Saturday I allowed myself to put my books aside since my husband had his first day off since early January. There were a lot of errands to run in order to prepare for his upcoming move, so I can't say it was a day of fun and relaxation, though we did manage to squeeze in a few moments of sweetness among the other moment of necessary preparations for separation. I don't envy his schedule - he has a short term separation that starts at the end of this week and only a week or so between his return from that and his relocation 400 miles away. Trying to figure out how to get all of his stuff taken care of and ready leaves little room for things like making sure we have enough groceries. Especially when he is still working 12-14 hour days most days.

Sunday, I was able to join a Chaplain friend as she conducted a military memorial service. This was my "future army chaplain" day, learning about the many moving parts that come together in the touching display of full Military Honors at a funeral. It helped that I was not emotionally involved, which I have been in my other experiences of Military Honors at a funeral. I admire the troops assigned to this duty as I imagine that it is difficult to be around so much grief on a regular basis and not really be able to do anything about it.

Today the schedule reverts to "normal" and I once again struggle to balance my three-fold path and not find myself stuck in any one label for too long.