We can’t go over it.
We can’t go under it.
Oh no!
We’ve got to go through it!
We listened as Michael Rosen recited that familiar refrain from my children’s favorite storybook. My son was four months new, my daughter three and a half, and their daddy had just left for his third deployment. I felt like I was in one of those dreams where you’re screaming at the top of your lungs but no sound is coming out and no one is coming to help you. Scary, dark, anxious thoughts filled my mind and I knew, to my very core, there was no way we were going to survive this.
Five years earlier, my husband (then my fiancee) had deployed to Kandahar, Afghanistan. There was no FaceTime; no Instagram. Just sketchy internet service, the random email, and $400 worth of monthly phone bills. We would steal pockets of time between work schedules and time differences to dream about our future; all with a soundtrack of explosions and gunfire playing in the background. One phone call, he told me the tent next to his had been hit by an incoming bomb. The next, they had discovered a vehicle loaded with explosives ready to be detonated for maximum casualties. The very real possibility that I could lose him sat in my mind with a tangible heaviness.
After eight long months filled with delays and diversions, he finally landed in Tucson and I felt like I could breathe again. Except I couldn’t breathe; in fact, my body felt like it was trying to kill me. After ER visits and extensive tests, they told me I was stressed.
“We can’t find anything wrong with you. I think you’re just having panic attacks.”
Thus began five of the most difficult and dark years I’ve ever known. My husband was my rock, my safe place, and my refuge. He prayed over me, held me in the night, and never once faltered in assuring me I was okay. The unconscious fear of losing him nearly paralyzed me. Until one day, he came home from work with tears streaming down his face; unable to speak.
I thought his dad had died. Or he had somehow lost his job. My mind was imagining a million terrible scenarios when he finally managed to choke it out. “I’m getting deployed. Next month.”
That familiar grip of terror and doom threatened to suffocate me inside a pitch black grave of helplessness and hopelessness. How was I supposed to take care of two little people on my own when I could barely manage myself? Postpartum depression and anxiety piled on top of sleep deprivation and deployment stress. I begged God to take this away from us; to make him stay somehow. And the answer came back: silence.
For 202 days, I was in an all-out war with my emotions, my sanity, and life in general. I was living in a foreign country, with a few friendly acquaintances, and operating under the belief that if I actually told someone how I was struggling, there would be repercussions for my instability. So I fought to hold on to the only thing I possibly could - my faith. I read my Bible, I kept a daily gratitude journal, and I kept praying for relief.
That relief came in the form of a humbling realization. For all my claims that God was my Rescuer, I had actually created an idol in the form of my husband. He was my rock, my safe place, and my refuge when those traits should have been attributed to my Heavenly Father. It was never fair or right for me to place those expectations on another human. My husband could never live up to those roles; particularly as a member of the military whose job it is to leave for months at a time.
Day by laborious day, God whittled away at that idolatrous monument I had created in my heart. It hurt, and it was scary, but it was also refining. While I felt weak and unstable, the ground I was standing on was steady and my roots grew deeper and deeper. And I began to see: if we never encounter difficulties on our own, we rob God of the opportunity to show up for us.
So here I sit, two weeks in to my husband’s fourth deployment. That brand new baby and his big sister are now nine and six. They are cuddled up with their three year old brother; watching tv after eating a dinner I prepared (a monumental feat for me!). We are okay. That fog of despair and hopelessness never even had a chance to settle here. I have come through the fire and know my Maker will never leave me. And while we have had some sad tears and hard moments, I am grateful that these babies of ours will get the gift of seeing God show up for them in their hard times; thus growing their faith.
Whether deployments, sorrows, or trials, that sweet refrain rings so true:
We can’t go over it.
We can’t go under it.
Oh no!
We’ve got to go through it!
And when we do, we can rest in the assurance that there is One who goes through it with us; working all things together for our good.
