This is a snip from my personal journal as I was floating on the USS Bataan during a MEU exercise in January.
"Finished the book, 'The Ugly American' today. It was an excellent book about thinking realistically, practically, and creatively to solve international problems. Fires that bit inside me that yearns for adventure and travel. But I believe in my soul, I am a family man. What good is an adventure if you can't take your family along with you?"
While I was on the Bataan I made the decision that Meghan and I will be getting out of the military following the upcoming deployment. I will likely write more on this decision at a later time but I think the above excerpt from my journal will suffice for now. It is time we start an adventure as a family.
May we aspire to live a quiet life, minding our own business, and working with our hands. 1 Thessalonians 4:11
May we rejoice always, pray without ceasing, and in everything give thanks. This is the will of God. - 1 Thessalonians 5:16
I remember where I was standing in the Sisco's living room/dining room when I brought 1 Th 4:11 up in our conversation and you immediately stopped me and asked me for the reference. I stopped and pulled it up in the Bible. A quiet, Christian life is not leaving the frontlines, it is being transferred to a different battleground. The fighting there is equally as fierce and the need for good and godly men who are good at being good men is high. in fact, so high, that the position of husband and father can only be done by one man. if he fails, there are no plan Bs. he is not one of their number, he is a unique member, irreplaceable.
ReplyDelete"A row of identically dressed and identically trained soldiers set side by side, or a number of citizens listed as voters in a constituency, are not members of anything in the Pauline sense. I am afraid that when we describe a man as 'a member of the Church' we usually mean nothing Pauline: we mean only that he is a unit--that he is one more specimen of the some kind of thing as X and Y and Z. How true membership in a body differs from inclusion in a collective may be seen in the structure of a family. The grandfather, the parents, the grown-up son, the child, the dog, and the cat are true members (in the organic sense) precisely because they are not members or units of a homogeneous class. They are not interchangeable. Each person is almost a species in himself. The mother is not simply a different person from the daughter, she is a different kind of person. The grown-up brother is not simply one unit in the class children, he is a separate estate of the realm. The father and grandfather are almost as different as the cat and the dog. If you subtract any one member you have not simply reduced the family in number, you have inflicted an injury on its structure. Its unity is a unity of unlikes, almost of incommensurables." -- C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory and other essays: Membership
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