Every three years

I was reminded again today of where I was on this Sunday of the year in 1989.  I was feeling emotionally forlorn on my way to my one-year remote tour of duty at Shemya AFB in the Aleutians - subsequently renamed Eareckson Air Station a year before it was officially closed as an active air station in 1994. In-processing was through Elmendorf AFB - now Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson - in Anchorage. Thus I found myself attending Mass at the base chapel in The Land of the Midnight Sun with a heavy heart, very much missing my family, trying to figure out how we were all going to get through the year of separation looming ahead of us.

I don't think I've ever heard a Scripture passage during Mass that has so conveyed a message that I needed to hear.  "Whoever sets his hand to the plow and looks back is unfit for the kingdom of heaven." It seems harsh, now, to apply these words to someone who was leaving his family behind to spend a year in such a remote place, but it would soon become clear that I would have plenty of work to occupy my time, both in my official duties and in music ministry. I didn't know this yet, of course. Still, this reading was just the reminder I needed, at a challenging time, that God would provide for us along the way. I needed to refocus my attention on what he would have me do where I was going, which would include nurturing my family from a distance, but without the sense that my life in him and with them was being suspended for a whole year.

As it would turn out, that year would present challenges I never dreamed of, particularly in its second half. To suggest that it would take us a long time to recover from the damage would be to misrepresent the true state of our lives at that point. Neither my bride nor I was emotionally healthy then, nor was our relationship, and in retrospect the events of that year are evidence of that state rather than its cause. But we have since done the hard work that was needed for each of us to become equipped to be partners in our life together, and this year now feels nostalgic for me, not in terms of longing to go back to that earlier time but because of the part of our history that it has become.