I learned about endurance when I married Ken.  I don't know what I was expecting, but it certainly wasn't having to endure.  But there I was in Pensacola, Florida.  Eighteen years old.  No car.  No friends, no church family.  Actually, no family at all.  Couldn't cook and didn't have a clue about what Ken did every day.  I couldn't even carry on a conversation about his work--I wouldn't have understood it anyway.  I was an appendage to his life and hadn't figured out what my life was yet.

And then the children came along--one every eighteen months.  Children that I had to raise almost entirely by myself because Ken worked sunup to sundown.  And nights--when he had cadets that had to learn instruments--how to fly in the dark.  Someone had to teach them how to do it.  The good thing was that we seldom had an argument because there was so little time together.  We had been married 3 years when he went overseas for 13 months and left me with two babies.  (Obviously, we crossed paths a few times!!)

We barely knew each other, and it was years before he was really there in our lives.  I just endured the days, weeks, and sometimes years that he was gone, waiting, holding it all together somehow.

Becky was very ill once, they hospitalized her--and gave her no chance of recovery.  Ken was deployed.  I asked if he could come in from the field.  The answer was "No, he has the experience in  laying steel tarmac.  We don't.  They need a tarmac runway in Nam...they're depending on him."

I sat in the hospital by myself night after night.  I didn't know the doctors.  Or the nurses.  Alone.  Wondering what was going to happen.  I don't know what people do at a time like that when they don't know God.  We had lost our third daughter two years earlier, and I felt that we were going to lose another one.  God intervened, and she lived.  And I endured.  What else could one do?

Every move, every childhood disease, every broken bone, every scraped knee, etc., etc...well, you know who took care of it.  There was no point in stressing.  There was nothing to be done about any of it.  Marine families live with great stress in difficult circumstances.  It's not normal--whatever that is.  I think a person either rises to the occasion, or gives up.  I don't give up.  What's the point in that.