I’m more an office geek these days - but it wears on me because of all the mind games & PC stuff people play these days. Part of why I got out was all the politics in the officer corps. I understand where your coming from on the devotional - I’m not much of a church goer, turned off it with the cliques that the ones I knew growing up in a small town had, but I read the good book and other studies on my own. It is though a different question if your on your own vs if you have to watch the family.
I’ve already decided that if the shooting were to ever stop I’d ship my wife back home to Japan with the kids and head for the woods of home. I can survive on my own pretty well with no issues - but picket ship tactics were never my forte :) That’s actually an easier battle in my mind - you know the enemy for the most part and you’ve got a goal in mind.
The harder one is as you say fighting for the future of your kids. So many people these days can’t look past tomorrow, let alone next year; so it’s hard to get the level of committment needed for the dedicated fight, and mentally it’s much more draining when you can’t fully grasp the enemy.
Fair winds following seas - and watch out for your strawberries :) (it really is a good movie)
A couple years back my nephew/godson was telling me why he likes the military, and he talked about how apolitical it is. His dad was a navy officer/pilot for quite a while so my sister had talked to me about the politics involved, and I had also just done quite a bit of research into the Able Danger thing, so I couldn’t help but think that my nephew was going to have a rude awakening.
It’s sort of like the rude awakening I had with the church also. I grew up #9 of 12 kids in a small dual-parish church made mostly of farmers like my family. We learned to get along because we had to and were just glad if we had a pastor at all. We never thought of the pastor as being different from anybody else. So it was a shock when I became engaged to a seminarian and he wanted me to read a book about divorce in the parsonage, concentrating on problems unique to pastors’ families largely because of the politics that go on in the church. I thought, “Geez, some people sure have a messiah complex. Why do pastors think they’re so different from everybody else?”
Suffice it to say that the book knew whereof it spoke. The congregation we’re at right now has been political to the point that it’s basically just the grace of God that I’m still alive and our family is intact.
Our first parish was a dual congregation, small-town, and it was literally like a family to us. Within one week I had gone to the hospital at 42 weeks to induce labor, our daughter had died during monitoring, I had given birth, we had buried our daughter, we had moved to another state, and my husband began the ministry. Those people embraced us with open arms and carried us through. I think they ministered more to us than we to them, but we gave them everything we had. They loved us through the birth of our first 3 living children, a miscarriage, and the beginning of a pregnancy the doctor initially told me was hopeless (she is now my snuggly 10-year-old). There was some politics there but it was small compared to the good-hearted people who really cared for each other - good, salt of the earth Minnesotans. Uff-dah. lol
Then we moved back to Nebraska, the good life. (And Nebraska is a great place to live, so don’t get me wrong.) Wow, what a change. There are some wonderful people here but politics like I had never had to deal with before. My world was literally thrown upside-down. There was just no place for me at all. I spent more and more time on the computer just because there was room for me there, and I could talk about things that mattered to me - the God stuff and the assault on the Constitution. But it really took a toll on the family so I got away from it and poured myself into home improvement. But I wondered what I was even still on earth for, if trying to impact my world was forbidden to me.
At one of the lowest points a friend - a military guy - said something that enabled me to communicate to my husband where I was at and what I needed. This military guy talked about the different levels of alertness in law enforcement and military. He said white is just normal. Yellow is where your suspicions are aroused, like if you’re patrolling or there’s something fishy going on. Red is full-out battle, where it’s either you and everything you love survives or the enemy survives. And black is when you’re at peace.
The Bible study we were doing was actually about peace so I asked him if the goal, then, was black because then you were at peace. He said, “Nellie, if you go black you’re dead. Black is to give up and accept the loss of everything you love.”
It was like he had looked into my soul and read me like an open book. I went home and explained to my husband what Dave had said and explained that I was tottering between red and black, from one moment to the next, and that even though he hates that I’m a fighter, at this point the only option instead of red is black. If I’m fighting at least I’m alive.
He had seen me go through some pretty serious panic attacks so he knew I wasn’t just bluffing, and he knew I had spent a couple hours at the doctor’s office because the doctor was deciding whether to let me go home. He decided I’d be better off red than dead. lol. Where red is MILITARY red - actually fighting communism and the decay of our freedom.
I struggle to find balance between the immediate family needs and the bigger, long-term picture (both earthly and eternal). And we go around about whether the potential gain is worth the risk in what I’ve been doing. Struggle over whether anything we the people do will actually make any real difference in the long run. The same kinds of stuff people process here a lot - and especially as we see the Obama regime attacking so much infrastructure.
As long as I can fight without jeopardizing his ministry he understands that it’s what I have to do. I would love to go back to building shelves and making quilts, but if I do it while the battle is still so thick it will be because I’ve gone black, not because the threat was conquered and the alertness subsides back to yellow and then white. I hope we can get back to the yellow zone someday, but as long as we’re in the red zone I have to fight. Only God knows who wins this particular earthly battle, whether freedom or oppression. But as long as I’m alive and the battle rages I have to fight for what I love even while taking time to also love what I love.
And speaking of that, my 10-year-old who was sick in the night really wants a little snuggle time. So I’d better go do that.
What do you mean by “picket ship tactics”? In your experience with the navy, did they talk about communism and Islamism at all, and how those enemies plan to defeat us by acting as domestic enemies within the command structure, government, and/or critical American infrastructure? Do they really try to know the enemy, and be aware of our vulnerabilities?
I look at Nidal Hasan and think that somebody really screwed up there - as if they had no clue of the tactics of the enemy or the danger of the PC garbage. I look at Able Danger and see the same thing. And now the DADT stuff, disarmament, Lakin, etc... it’s just scary to me because I don’t know if what Dave told me about the military having contingency plans to cover everything is really true. Seems like they’re ignoring this PC/domestic enemy elephant in the room even while it makes hay out of our security.
Sorry this is so long.