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Hebrews 12:11-13
“No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful. Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it. Therefore, strengthen your feeble arms and weak knees.”
Whether you’re preparing for a homecoming after a long deployment, or just want to fit into your skinny jeans, chances are, if you’re like me, you’re looking for a quick & easy way to tight and tone up this summer. (Continue Reading)
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This post is part of our ongoing series “What Wives of Faith Means to Me.” We’ll be sharing stories and we want to read your Wives of Faith story too. Please email me at pattie@wivesoffaith.org, or you can use the handy-dandy form here.
The next post in our series “What Wives of Faith Means to Me” comes from longtime blog contributor Amber Parham:
I found Wives of Faith at what was probably my lowest point during my husband’s deployment. I was searching for help. I needed someone to understand what I was going through. Deployment, for me, was nothing like I had thought it would be. I didn’t have a Family Readiness Group full of close friends to gleefully savor the tiny bits of information that would come in from Iraq. The closest FRG meeting was 45 minutes away. And it wasn’t even the unit my husband had been attached to. But, first, a little history …
My husband is in the Army National Guard. He joined when I was five months pregnant with our first child, a boy. A few months after we had purchased our first home and a few months before our son turned two, word started to trickle down from the unit command at the training facility where T works that he needed to start preparing to go. He went. And I was in over my head raising a preschooler, working full time and having a husband overseas.
My mother helped out a lot by taking The Boy every Wednesday night so I had some time to myself. It was on one of those Wednesday nights when I was exhausted and worn out that I knew that the only thing that would get me through the rest of time until T got home was faith. So in my search bar I typed in “military wife faith.” I’m not sure what I expected to find, I just knew I needed something besides another forum that was filled with desperation and hopelessness. What I found was an article that Sara had written. It talked about sandpaper, and how the roughness and grit is a tool that we use to bring out the beauty of the grain and to smooth the rough edges. I read it twice that night and more than once since then. I knew that I had found a place where I could be understood and most importantly encouraged — a place where the faith of my sisters could make me stronger when I had little.
We made it through. And now, Wives of Faith is a place where I can minister to others. I can share my talents and what I have learned to help comfort and encourage women going through the same things I went through. I don’t have all the answers, but I can look back at the time when I felt so alone. I see now that I was in the crucible. I see where I came from, and see how the immaturity and codependency were burned away. I am so thankful that I can stand here, on the other side and say that there is hope! And that there is good that can come out of difficult phases even though we can’t see it at the time.
The ladies that have become my friends (and I hope that there will be more and more) have helped me, encouraged me and prayed with me. I look forward to doing the same for you when you need it.
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Welcome back to our 2013 weekly blog link-up! Wife 2 Wife is an opportunity for you as a military wife to share your heart with another military wife on issues and challenges that all of us face at one time or another in military life and get to know a LOT of other military wives. This is your chance to connect with other Wives of Faith!
Some questions will be fun, some will be serious, but EVERY week will be a GREAT WEEK!
Join us in the conversation! If you have your own blog, we encourage you to post your answer there and come link-up here so we can visit you… or if you don’t blog, but you’d still like to take part, then just add your thoughts in the comments!
Please note that link-ups will close the day before the next Wife 2 Wife Wednesday blog post.
This week’s question:
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This post is part of our ongoing series “What Wives of Faith Means to Me.” We’ll be sharing stories and we want to read your Wives of Faith story too. Please email me at pattie@wivesoffaith.org, or you can use the handy-dandy form here.
The next post in our series “What Wives of Faith Means to Me” comes from our founder and President of Wives of Faith, Sara Horn:
He was deploying. For almost eight years, my strong husband who I adored had served as a Navy reservist, but I’d never seen myself as a military spouse. Cliff drilled four hours from where we lived in Nashville. I’d only been on base a couple of times and I’d certainly never been around other military or spouses. It just wasn’t part of my world.
Until Cliff’s orders came. That’s when I realized that my world was about to drastically change. (Continue Reading)
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“Better a patient person than a warrior, one with self-control than one who takes a city.”
(Proverbs 16:32, NIV)
In the kitchen sits our pet bird, Blue, named by our youngest child because…well, he is the color blue. Every now and again, for no apparent rhyme or reason, Blue has what I term a feather fiasco. In his quaint corner abode, he suddenly begins fluttering around his cage, flapping his little wings and squawking wildly, stirring up any loose feathers so they ultimately end up all over the kitchen floor. Then just as suddenly as he flew into his “fit,” he stops and just perches on one of his little steps, as if nothing happened.
I have thought about these little feather fiascos and how we are similar to Blue in some ways. (Continue Reading)
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This post is part of our ongoing series “What Wives of Faith Means to Me.” We’ll be sharing stories and we want to read your Wives of Faith story too. Please email me at pattie@wivesoffaith.org, or you can use the handy-dandy form here.
The next post in our series “What Wives of Faith Means to Me” comes from Leanne Miller, our Local Groups Director:
As a new military spouse in 2008, I was hungry to find support and encouragement and words of wisdom on how to be a Christian military spouse. I was living in a new town, new state, new role as a wife, new apartment, on a small base where I had not met any Christian wives. My Internet search for Bible studies and books written by Christian military spouses for other military spouses led me to Wives of Faith. I immediately became a member and was blessed by the newsletters and e-mails from Sara and others.
Living in a desert, literally, Wives of Faith was water to my soul. My heart connected with the heart of Wives of Faith. Within a year and around the time we moved to a new duty station, I signed up to start a local group to take Wives of Faith to others and share Sara’s words of support and encouragement via her book that was released that year, God Strong (which we are studying this month). Her words, truly inspired by God, carried me and other wives through a very tough combat deployment….and my first deployment.
I stay with Wives of Faith because I am blessed with Christ focused encouragement and support that relates to my struggles as a mil-spouse. I, in turn, want to bless others through Wives of Faith and point them to our only hope as mil spouses, Jesus. At Wives of Faith, I know I will always be able to find and connect with other Christian mil-spouses who love Jesus and want to show that to the military communities we live in. I have found it hard to meet other Christian mil-spouses who want to live a lifestyle different from the ones we see around us, which consists of survival. With God in us and living through us, we can more than survive, we can live a life of hope and strength.
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Welcome back to our 2013 weekly blog link-up! We took a break last week for Military Spouse Appreciation Week, but we’re back now with our Wife 2 Wife Wednesday linkup.
Wife 2 Wife is an opportunity for you as a military wife to share your heart with another military wife on issues and challenges that all of us face at one time or another in military life and get to know a LOT of other military wives. This is your chance to connect with other Wives of Faith!
Some questions will be fun, some will be serious, but EVERY week will be a GREAT WEEK!
Join us in the conversation! If you have your own blog, we encourage you to post your answer there and come link-up here so we can visit you… or if you don’t blog, but you’d still like to take part, then just add your thoughts in the comments!
Please note that link-ups will close the day before the next Wife 2 Wife Wednesday blog post.
This week’s question:
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