I learned so many lessons at the start of 2018, but I think the biggest was that God works in ways that I do not understand. If I had known everything that Josh and I needed to do to become the people we needed to be, we wouldn’t need God or His will for our lives. God doesn’t give ten-year plans because He likes to be returned to. He wants our hearts so badly that He sent His only Son to make a way for us. In order to surrender to whatever God has in store, I also have to abandon all ideas of what I think the end result should look like. I started to reflect on my job. I finally realized that faith should be practical. If it only counts in front of an audience or when it’s life or death, then the majority of the world can’t experience God on a personal level. I started asking God what I should learn in the difficult things that happened on a day-to-day basis instead of asking Him to take the difficulties away completely. The more I prayed, the more I prevailed. I didn’t suddenly do everything right at work, but I decided to stop telling myself I was a screw-up. I started looking at my planning as a means to bring peace to my team and thus my life. I chose to believe it would make a difference.
CHAPTER TWENTYETERNAL MISSION
Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here!
—2 Corinthians 5:17
JOSH
When I went under the water during my baptism, I had one very specific thing I vowed to set myself free from: shame. Thinking back on our first night of this small group, I remembered that the fall of man—the lying and hiding from God—manifested under the feeling of shame. Covering the topic of shame was what made me buy into this curriculum in the first place because it explained shame as more than guilt. Guilt is a bad feeling about what you’ve done. Shame is a bad feeling about who you are. When my subconscious plan was to only live up to the ceiling of my capabilities, that ceiling stayed low because shame said I couldn’t do any better. No matter what, I had been selfish, an unfaithful husband, dishonest, and a bad friend. And until I decided to renounce those things in my life, I understood that my fate was to drag those labels into every area of my life, doing my best to cover them up.
I knew that was not what God wanted for me. I knew that a big part of showing gratitude for my opportunity to live and honoring those like Juan Navarro meant carrying on to the best of my ability. Looking back on my life, caving in to guilt and shame is the reason my repentance never worked. Whenever I tried to turn away from something because I felt guilty, I could only turn away for a little while. I returned to harmful things because the guilt labeled me, which made me feel like sin would always be something I would have to hide from instead of confront. But I had already learned how to confront bad things: I stood face-to-face with evil every day in Afghanistan. While I had been afraid of my deployment and I was even more fearful going into my last mission, I had to confront the enemy that was trying to attack us. As scary as it was, I wanted to be aggressive when we were under fire so the enemy couldn’t gain any ground. The attitude that I had adopted over my own life was almost the opposite of that. I wasn’t speaking truth over these labels, and I didn’t even pray over them until they were exposed. I just stayed in this frustration of longing for acceptance while also feeling like I didn’t have the power to live differently.
I finally understood that sin is not this huge moment of doing something bad. It is like a slow poisoning of all the good things in your life. If I continued to choose a life of hiding the things I felt guilty about, then eventually it would separate me from the relationships that would sustain me through the rest of my life. Whether I thought about my shortcomings in my marriage or losing Juan, I had to realize that I couldn’t always trust how I felt. I needed good friends, real friends, who understood. For the longest time I believed that being around real friends might actually cause me more pain, but if I had just one friend who understood the anguish I carried from my deployment or how hard it was to be married sometimes or what it was like to be handicapped, maybe I could repent with confidence, because I had people who would remind me that I am more than the worst things that have happened to me.
This is my vice as a combat veteran. I desperately want to live a life worthy of the name of my fallen friend, while I question myself every day about whether I could have done something differently. It’s a question that is too intense for a civilian. In fact, I will go on record to say that as much as I have opened up to Paige, there are parts of my deployment that I will never be able to tell her. But it’s why I need my veteran friends. I need the ones who get it. I need the people who feel the extreme sadness, pride, and joy at the same time when we think back on our time of service. We don’t have to constantly talk about everything that happened to us, but because we know all those details, we can look out for each other and our futures. If our time of service leaves us in
