I started this idea yesterday about the hope we have (oh-one admin note – make sure you click on “Read more” to read the entire post), and Danie brought up an interesting point. She commented and said that she thought deployments have a way of changing what we hope for. I think she’s right.

Deployments do change a lot of things and that includes our perspectives. Before my husband deployed, my perspective was different. What I thought important before my husband left wasn’t the same thing after he was gone. Before he left, I looked more at the future, and big goals and big plans, but after he deployed, those goals changed too, and I focused much more on the present, and maybe even a little on the past. I realized how much more I valued the little things and I treasured moments and words and images with much greater focus and gratitude…

So what is our hope when we’re in the midst of deployment and Christmas is right on top of us? Is it a happy hope? Is it a sad hope? Can it be a little of both?

I think it is easier to dwell on hopeful sadness than it is to focus on hopeful gladness. Who wants to be glad when their husband is away?

Hopeful sadness is feeling like “well, there’s nothing I can do but hope for the best and just get through this.” Hopeful gladness pulls our focus away from looking down at our feet and, instead, helps us look straight ahead. “I miss my husband terribly but I’m putting my hope in the joys and the good things that are still part of today, and I am relying on Jesus to help me do it.”

This is the difference I think we can find in ourselves when we have a relationship with Christ. Because we must remember we aren’t by ourselves this Christmas. That as in love as we are with our husbands, God’s love is even greater and it is His love that sustains us.

Now, I know that it is easier to say that than to live it. I struggled a great deal the summer my husband was in Iraq. I sat in my living room with the shades drawn on the 4th of July, not feeling much in the way of celebrating our country’s freedoms at all. It was hard, and it was lonely and there were challenges coming up that I had to deal with and all I could wonder was, “God, are you there?” Of course, I knew He was. But my emotions and my belief weren’t cooperating.

C.S. Lewis writes in his book, Mere Christianity, about faith and emotion and how our feelings will change, but our belief doesn’t have to. We know what Christ did for us and we know what that means to us. We know He came to Earth to ultimately die for our sins and live again for us. That is our belief, that is our faith. But our emotions don’t always reflect that. I can still have a bad day despite knowing that I have a Savior. So, Lewis says that “faith is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods” and that we must “train the habit of Faith.”

More on that tomorrow…

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