A comment on my last blog entry got me to thinking about all of the plaques, signed pictures, medals, and awards that I “earned” while I was in the Navy. You know what? Most of them made me feel pretty underappreciated. Here are a few examples:-- At the end of my first at-sea tour, as a young Lieutenant, my boss told me, “Write yourself up for an end-of-tour medal, and have it on my desk by next Tuesday.” I thought to myself, “Wow, you think so highly of me that you are giving me the honor of submitting my own name for an award? I’m speechless.” Now, this might come as a surprise to some of you, but in my younger days I was a bit of a smart aleck at times. I told my boss I wasn’t going to do it, and if he thought I deserved an award, he should write it up himself. (That boss didn’t like me very much, as I recall.) (Also, I would add, it was clearly obvious from a very early stage in my career that I would never make Admiral.)-- When I first arrived at one of my Navy commands, I was informed that as a member of the Wardroom Mess (group of officers on the staff), that in addition to my monthly dues, I was required to pay $10 a month for the first three months to cover the cost of my farewell plaque (which I would receive two years later when I left the command). I felt instantly appreciated. Let me tell you, while that plaque is, at this very moment, sitting with all my other plaques in a box up in the attic, I can assure you that that one is on top of the pile!-- Many awards and commendations I received had my name misspelled, but I kind of got used to that.-- I was once the victim of “award inflation adjustment.” All of my predecessors at a certain job had been given a particular award for a specific measure of performance. However, when it came my time to depart, I received a lesser award. I admit, I was expecting to be recognized at the same level, and I was a little discouraged. What had I done wrong? The answer was nothing, it’s just that a senior officer deemed that the previous awards were “too high,” and the time was right to “adjust” the giving out of awards to an appropriate “representative level.” Oh well. Bad timing I guess. From what I have just shared, you might think that I never felt appreciated in my twenty years in the Navy. But that is most definitely not the case. I have some vivid memories of specific times when I felt much appreciated, times when I received recognition that really made me feel good. But by and large, I did not receive medals or awards for those things. It’s weird, but a pretty consistent theme of my Navy career seems to be that I got plaques, awards, and medals for a lot of stuff that didn’t matter much. Yet, the things that I really cherish, the accomplishments I hold most dear, things I did that really caused people to appreciate me . . . those are the things that don’t show up in my collection of medals, ribbons, and plaques. And that is certainly okay by me.
My story . . . Part 1 of several
Hebrews 11:1 says, “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”
In the year 2000, I was a thirty-four year old man who was kind of floating along in what most people would call a successful life. I had (and still have) a wonderful wife, Barbara, who was my college sweetheart and definite better half. I had a son, Chad, who was (and still is) a smart, handsome, athletic young man with a strong Christian character. I was working my way up in the Navy, making all of my promotions. I had served in some very prestigious jobs, in particular as an intelligence briefing officer to the Secretary of the Navy and Chief of Naval Operations at the Pentagon. My health was great. I owned a house. I had a nice car and a nice van. I had lots of good friends. I was very active in my church, serving at various times as a deacon, a choir member, and as a preschool Sunday School teacher. What more could I want?
Well, as it turns out, in 2000, I was more miserable than I had ever been in my entire life. The reason? Barbara and I had always desired to have a family of two, three, perhaps even four children. And as we began to try harder and harder to have a second child, we just could not conceive. Finally, we consulted medical help and found that we were having what doctors call unexplained fertility problems. Over the course of several months in 2000, as we went in for various counseling and testing, I found myself growing more and more bitter over the situation. And it started to affect many areas of my life.
For instance, I had long wanted to do a Navy tour overseas, particularly in Europe. Well, in 2000, it happened. Serving in the Norfolk area, I got my next set of orders—to England for a three-year tour. Except, with all of the infertility stuff going on, I suddenly found myself not very excited about going to England. I can still remember a night in early fall of 2000, mowing my lawn and nearly in tears. I was cursing, saying “I don’t want to go to England. I don’t want this house. I don’t want anything. Why am I not able to have another child?”
What made me even more distraught about this was that deep inside, I knew how selfish I was being, and I didn’t like it. What right did I have to be angry? Many couples are unable to have any kids, and I was blessed with Chad (born in 1992 by the way), who to this day is everything a father could ever want in a son. In addition, I claimed to be a Christian, yet I was giving no thought at all to what God might want for my life. My attitude was that God should let me have what I wanted. And I wanted to have another child. In my heart I felt that I would be willing to give up my career, house, cars—all the “stuff” that I had—if only we could conceive again.
Reluctantly, I began to think that maybe moving to England might be “good” in that it would take my mind off of our infertility problems. A change of scenery would let me move on from this chapter in my life. Maybe in the future we could start looking into the possibility of adoption. At any rate, I couldn’t believe that I was once so excited about going to Europe, and now I could care less about it. So, in the fall of 2000, Barb, Chad, and I started the “overseas screening process.” We had our initial required medical examinations, and I began making contact with the officer in England who I would relieve. We started to make preparations for selling our home, too. In late September of 2000, we had our first yard sale to get rid of some of our stuff.
Among other things, we sold almost all of Chad’s baby toys, clothes, portable items (i.e. playpens), and books at the yard sale. There was hardly any baby stuff left.
Oh, no. I made a big-time rookie blogger mistake. I announced in advance that I would give one more episode of my story. I didn’t realize that it will really take a couple of more entries to get you up to speed on where my life is right now. So please forgive me, and I am so thankful for your indulgence, and for the kind comments that I have received from you so far. I shall continue now.
Back in 2000, if you had asked me where I was heading—where I saw myself in ten years—I would not have been able to give a very clear answer. My career in the Navy was promising, and I liked the idea of serving my country. So, I guess I would have said that I would stay in the Navy, see the world, get promoted as high as possible, and then retire from active duty in my mid-forties. Beyond that, I had no real ambition, no real clue as to what I wanted to do—no real passion.
But in 2002 and 2003, in the first few years after Matthew’s birth, three things occurred in my life that changed this outlook dramatically.
The first was my job. Do you remember that when we got pregnant with Matthew back in 2000, we did not move to England, but rather, I was assigned to a job in Virginia Beach? Well, even though I enjoyed that new assignment, it was not considered particularly “career enhancing.” In 2002, I experienced something I never thought I would—I failed to promote to the rank of Commander. Now, within the culture of the Navy, this was a significant blow. It was humiliating, embarrassing, and left me very lonely at work. For months, I felt as though I needed to yell out, “Unclean! Unclean!” before entering someone’s office. Seriously, within my community in the Navy, a “failure to promote” often leaves one ostracized, and is the kiss of death for one’s career progression.
Again, though, God was very gracious to me, and I did eventually make the promotion two years later. But by that point, I knew that I would be riding out the remainder of a twenty-year Navy career, and that I would be entering a new phase in life. This caused me to think long and hard about what I was going to do with the rest of my life. What career should I pursue after my days in the Navy were over? And, did Hebrews 11:1 have anything to do with all this?
On the one hand, I thought, I could probably slide out of the Navy, get a good job in the defense sector, make good money, and live comfortably for the rest of my life. But over time, a question kept coming to my mind: That’s all well and good, but, what is my passion? I was, and am, very happy to have served my country in the Navy, but I can’t say that it was my passion, the thing that I was “born to do.” Was there something out there that I loved so much that I just had to do it for the rest of my life?
So, as I watched my Navy career begin to fizzle, I also came to the depressing realization that I had no real passion for what I wanted to do in life. I remember a brief phase when I daydreamed about becoming “independently wealthy” enough to quit all work by my mid-50s, and just do nothing for the rest of my life. I had no passion.
This was one of those points where I began to replay the whole experience of Matthew’s birth in my mind. God had done amazing things. He really is there. I really can have faith in him. So, this was a time when I put Hebrews 11:1 to the test. I started to pray that God would help me to see what I should do with my life, what career I should pursue. And I prayed that I would be able to accept it and do what God wanted. What happened next surprised me as much as anything else in this whole saga.
