Hope Dies Hard

 There are times when I'm brought back in my imagination to that place in the desert, the military base which I've constructed from actual photos. I can only imagine what it actually looked like to him. The photos are very few and limited in what they show. Day by day for about 6 months I imagined him waking and going to sleep. I tried to think about what his day looked like, although I had no idea. I read several books on military chaplains on deployment. I read about their duties, their locations, the challenges they faced and the things they did. I tried to picture him in many of these activities. Mostly, I saw him listening to service members share their struggles and he in turn giving counsel, guidance, comfort, and praying with them. That was not hard to imagine.

It baffles me to this day, totally mystifies me, as to why I cared so much. Why was I so curious? Why do those memories drift across my consciousness now that I know there was another woman who was privy to all that information? There was someone who regularly face timed him and actually saw his room and the area that he lived in. She spoke to him regularly and heard about his daily activities and thoughts about such things. When I found out she existed and has been in a relationship with him during his deployment I wrestled with envy and disappointment that I had not been the one in that position. 

As I struggled with tears and heart anguish over this new revelation, I heard God quietly push into my thinking, ever so gently and matter-of-fact, "You didn't miss out on anything."  I'm not exactly sure what to make out of that revelation. But I trust God and I know he knows best for me.

Still, I have this haunting feeling that I left a part of myself in that desert, my hopes and anticipation, my desire for reuniting, left drifting like sand that gets carried away when the wind whips up, off into the distance. And yet, I recall this experience many, many years ago (https://halfdozengirls.blogspot.com/2010/08/i-vacationed-in-hell-and-lived-to-tell.html). 

God is with me and he finds me, faithfully and mercifully, again and again. I am overcome by gratitude.

Hope dies hard, but God excels in hard.