“Your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus: Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself and became obedient to death–even death on a cross! Therefore God exalted him to the highest place and gave him the name that is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.” -Philippians 2: 5-11. Read More→
Hello ladies! How is the study going so far? We are now a little over halfway through! Don’t forget to post at least 3 times, answering the questions and responding to others.
Happy Independence Day! I pray, that even as your husbands are away today, that you know the difference they – and you – make for this nation.
Discussion Questions:
1. Have you ever felt like no one understood what you were going through? How does this misunderstanding from others make deployment more difficult?
2. If you’re comfortable with doing it, describe a situation when you felt stuck in an emotional desert.
3. We talked in the chapter about finding shelter in God’s love for us. Have you experienced this shelter from God? If so, describe it.
4. We looked at some discouraging circumstances in the life of Noah, David, the Israelites and Hannah. With which of these situations could you most relate?
5. Part of the journey of deployment includes emotional highs and lows. What can you do to combat this emotional roller coaster?
6. We asked on page 63 for you to describe a time when belief in God’s absolute control over a situation encouraged you or someone you know. If you’re comfortable in doing so, share that time with us here.
7. Do you believe that God sympathizes and understands when we struggle? If so, how does that help you?
8. In what ways can you make deployment easier on yourself by realizing you don’t have to be perfect?
9. Which Scripture passage out of the ones that identify rest on p. 67 meant the most to you?
10. How does knowing that God will walk with you through the Desert of Enough help you today?
11. Anything else about the chapter that you’d like to talk about? Please share!
Homework for next week: Read Chapter 5 in Tour of Duty
Today marks the official halfway point of our 8-week study! Congratulations! You are doing great!
Discussion Questions for Embracing the Detours
1. What unexpected disasters have you experienced in your spouse’s absence? Share both the funny and the serious.
2. This week you learned about the value of trusting God in the middle of chaotic situations and drama. What tips or techniques do you call on to stay calm when the unexpected comes calling?
3. Detours are not always bad things. What fun experiences did you list to answer the question on page 43 regarding the back-road detours?
4. Which detour seems to hit home with you the most – marriage detours, family detours, financial detours, or life detours? How can you better cope with these particular detours?
5. Detours in deployment happen to every military family. How did you learn this week to face these detours with confidence in God rather than to take on a defeated mentality?
6. A challenge from this week was to get off the sidelines and run the race God has for you. How can you put this challenge into action this coming week?
7. You spent a lot of time this week in Genesis 39-42, studying the life of Joseph. What stood out to you in those scripture passages as you studied them?
8. Joseph learned from his detours and his unfortunate experiences, and they helped him to be the leader he was in the end. How have your detours and unfortunate experiences made you more thankful or more equipped to handle life’s situations and circumstances?
9. What else about the chapter that stood out to you this week you’d like to share with us?
Homework for next week: Read Chapter 4, The Desert of Enough in Tour of Duty.
Welcome to the beginning of our summer online study of Tour of Duty: Preparing Our Hearts for Deployment! (If you are just finding out about this, you are more than welcome to participate with us – however, registration is closed, so you will not be able to be added to a small group or receive the weekly emails.)
Please review the video and the information below for a welcome, ground rules and some thoughts on building community and making friends while we’re going through this study. Be sure to READ TO THE END because all of your discussion questions are located at the bottom of this post!
Welcome!
122 of you have signed up to participate from all over the country. Some of you have only been married for a few months, others of you more than 20 years. All of us have a desire to seek God first when it comes to deployment.
The book is divided into 8 weeks – this is an introductory week and I am asking you to have Chapter 1 read before we meet next week. Each Monday a new post will be up, including a video, but you can watch when it is convenient for you. We only ask that you please comment at least three times during the week with your thoughts/questions about each chapter.
Ground Rules
An online study is a little different than meeting in a small group face to face. So please be mindful of Op Sec! Don’t share specific movement dates,or specific locations for your service member or for you. Iraq and Alabama are ok – Al Asad Iraq and Auburn, Alabama are too specific.
Feel free to use your first name, but please do not use your full name, do not share email addresses or phone numbers in the comments. A member roster will be emailed this week to all of our participating study members who indicated they wanted to receive a member roster. If you do not receive this, please contact me (sara@wivesoffaith.org) and I’ll try to help.
Be kind and loving and respectful when talking with one another. Understand not everyone may have the same experience with church as you may, and some ladies may be very new to a relationship with God.
Leave rank at the door (and in your comments). We are all spouses supporting our service members.
While the majority of our participants are wives, we do have a few fiances and girlfriends joining us as well. Please be respectful and supportive of their feelings as well.
Please comment at least 3 times each week – ask a question, respond to someone else’s question, share your thoughts about what you’re reading/studying. There will be many discussion prompts for you each week to pull from.
If you get behind, don’t give up!! Just jump back in where we are and plan on going back and catching up when you can.
All of our participants who finish with us at the end of July will receive a special Tour of Duty study achievement certificate.
Community
For this summer study, we have recruited small group leaders we are calling Tour Guides, who have been assigned to contact and keep up with the assigned ladies in their groups. This will be one way for you to connect directly with other military spouses. You will also have the member roster as I mentioned above – let me encourage you, as you get to know ladies on the website, or if you see ladies listed in your state, to contact these new friends directly. The more active you are in talking with ladies each week, the more support and community you’ll experience. You are not alone!
A BIG Thank You to my co-leaders, Jessica Crow and Alicia Shepherd!
Jessica has been part of Wives of Faith for almost 2 years and has served as our MemberCare Director for just over a year. Her husband is in the Alabama National Guard, currently serving his third deployment to Afghanistan, and they have two adorable children, a boy and a girl. She is a leader for her husband’s unit’s FRG. Visit her beautiful blog at The Crow Family.
Alicia joined Wives of Faith at the beginning of this year. She is an Army wife and mother to two beautiful kids, also a boy and girl. Her family is stationed at Fort Carson, Colorado. Her husband just recently left for a deployment.
Both Jessica and Alicia have taught the Tour of Duty study – Jessica, with a group of friends in her home, and Alicia with a group of ladies from her husband’s unit as they got ready to start their deployments. I am thrilled to have both of them helping with the study this summer. They will be online, responding to comments and if you have any questions, feel free to contact either of them (Jessica – jessicac@wivesoffaith.org or Alicia – alicia@wivesoffaith.org).
I also want to welcome our Tour Guides for this semester – Holly Massie, Joanna Rummel, Judi Fuller, Kim Wade, Kelly Hurtado, Pamela Price, Sarah Gravely, Alaina Fitzner and Tonya Van Winkle. These precious ladies have all been through the study before as well and have agreed to be small group leaders for this semester. They will be connecting with the ladies they’ve been assigned once a week, and I’m grateful for their willing hearts and how they will serve military spouses in this way. Thank you ladies!!
OK, LET’S GET TO KNOW EACH OTHER!
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS FOR THIS WEEK (answer these in the comments below):
1. How long have you and your husband been married?
2. What has deployment been like so far?
3. What are you hoping to get out of this small group experience?
4. What do you think a tour of duty looks like for a military wife?
5. How would you describe your journey as a military wife to this point?
6. Read Proverbs 3:5-6. What does it mean not to lean on your own understanding? How easy or hard is this to do during deployment? Why?
YOUR HOMEWORK THIS WEEK: Read Chapter 1 in Tour of Duty.
This week we are talking about our husband’s past. A lot of things from the past can affect our futures. A lot of things from the past are carried into our marriages. This is why it is so important to pray for our husband’s past. We may think we know everything about him, but we may not know how those things in the past have affected him, and how it affects him every day.
“The past should not be a place where we live, but something from which we learn. ‘Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus‘ (Philippians 2:13-14). God is a redeemer and a restorer. We need to allow him to be both. He can redeem the past and restore what was lost. He can make up for the bad things that have happened (Psalm 90:15). We must trust Him to do those things. We can never move out of the present into the future of what God has for us if we cling to and live in the past.”
“Your husband’s past not only affects him, it affects your offspring as well. More is passed down to your children and grandchildren than just the color of your hair and eyes. We can leave a legacy as painful and damaging as the one we experienced ourselves. We can bequeath a heritage of divorce, anger, anxiety, depression, and fear, to name a few. Whatever you and your husband can free yourselves from will mean more freedom for them. As long as you dwell in the past, you not only lose some of what God has for your future, but for your children’s future as well.”
I so agree with what Stormie is saying, because I have seen it happen in my own family. My dad did not have a very loving father. His father was very mean, critical, and verbally abusive. My father brought that into his own marriage and sadly did a lot of the same things. It affected (and is still affecting today) my mom, my brothers, and myself, and my parent’s marriage ended in divorce. But the thing that has made a difference to me, is not living in the past. Not thinking about all the things that happened before, and how they may have “ruined” my life, but looking to change things not only for myself, but for my husband and son as well.I do not have to follow in my family’s footsteps, I can choose to make a difference, and determine that our family will not be the same.
I have learned from the mistakes of the past, and moved on to face a brighter future, and you can too! No matter what your past is, and no matter what your husband’s pastmay be, God knows it all, and you can both pray about it and determine to change and make a change so that you will not carry it on and so your children will not carry it on. It takes, faith, patience, and hard work, but it will be worth it to break free from the chains of the past. If you have a husband who has had a bad past, pray for him. God knows exactly what he is going through, and God knows EXACTLY how to help him. Only He can heal those hurts, not you. And when he does your family with be on a path to a more beautiful future, and a beautiful legacy as well.
“For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future” -Jeremiah 29:11
“The events of your husband’s past that most affect his life today probably occurred in his childhood. Bad things that happened or good things that didn’t happen with family members are the most significant. Being labeled in a certain way by a relative or peer carries over into adulthood. Such words as ‘fat,’ ‘stupid,’ uncoordinated,’ ‘failure,’ ‘poor,’ ‘looser,’ ‘slob,’ ‘four-eyes,’ ‘slow,’ or ‘idiot’ take their toll and imprint themselves into the mind and emotions well into adulthood. While no one can pretend the past didn’t happen, it’s possible to pray that all the effects of it are removed. No one is destined to live with them forever.”
“God says we are to cry out for deliverance, walk in His ways, proclaim His truth, and then we will find freedom from our past. But sometimes there are levels of freedom to go through. Your husband may think he’s gotten free of something and it will rear its head again, leaving him feeling like he’s right back where he started. Tell him not to be discouraged by that. If he has been walking with the Lord, he is probably moving into a deeper level of liberty that God wants to work in his life. Your prayers will surely gird him for the journey to greater freedom.”
“Being set free from the past can happen quickly or it can be a step-by-step process, depending on what God is teaching. The problem is, you can’t make it happen on your timetable. You have to be patient and pray for as long as it takes to keep the voices of the past at bay so that your husband can make the decision to not listen to them.”
I don’t know about you, but I learned a lot from this chapter! There are so many things that can have strongholds in our husband’s lives, and the past I would say is the most important one. I am so thankful we can go to God for things like this, and that He has the power to change, heal, and set free!
Prayer:
“Lord, I pray that You would enable (husband’s name) to let go of his past completely. Deliver him from any hold it has on him. Help him to put off his former conduct and habitual ways of thinking about it and be renewed in his mind (Ephesians 4:22-23). Enlarge his understanding to know that You make all things new (Revelation 21:5). Show him a fresh, Holy Spirit-inspired way of relating to negative things that have happened. Give him the mind of Christ so that he can clearly discern Your voice from the voices of the past. When he hears those old voices, enable him to rise up and shut them down with the truth of Your Word. Where he has formerly experienced rejection or pain, I pray he not allow them to color what he see and hears now. Pour forgiveness into his heart so that bitterness, resentment, revenge, and unforgiveness will have no place there. May he regard the past as only a history lesson and not a guide for his daily life. Wherever his past has become an unpleasant memory, I pray You would redeem it and bring life out of it. Help him to release the past so that he will not live in it, but learn from it, break out of it, and move into the future You have for him.”
Power Tools:
-Isaiah 43:18-19
-II Corinthians 5:17
-Ephesians 4:22-24
-II Corinthians 4:16
-Revelation 21:4
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