At eighteen, I married, left Oklahoma and moved to Florida to start a strange new life.  My husband was a Marine--an instructor at Pensacola Naval Air station.   He was nine years older than I was, with an established reputation and career.  I, however, had neither.  I left the sheltered safe haven of the Oklahoma Bible Belt for life as a military wife.  

I had no concept of how to cope.  I had never bought anything in a grocery store in my entire life--which didn’t matter because I wouldn’t have known what to do with it anyway.  I couldn’t cook.  I didn't know how to do much of anything that was useful.

Most of the officer’s wives were college educated, well traveled and self sufficient.  I wasn’t.  I was the youngest officer's wife on base.  I had no friends.   My family was in Oklahoma.  I was in Florida. It might as well have been the moon.  My existence was pretty miserable and very lonely.  Ken worked from sunup to sundown.  I was alone most of the time in a strange place where I didn't know a single soul other than my husband.  And I saw very little of him.

I was so young.  I Graduated High School in May, married in August and was standing in a receiving line serving coffee to the troops in September.  Welcoming new families to the Marine Corps.  Supposedly an adult; but in truth, still a kid...“Be not afraid for I am with you.  My rod and my staff will comfort you..."  My brain bubbled up scripture.

We joined a church and within weeks, I was teaching a class of Junior girls.  Which didn't seem to bother anyone.  An eighteen year old teaching sixteen year old girls.  But it was the scripture stored in my head that enabled me to do it.  I found out that when the scripture said, "My words will not return unto me empty," that it was actually true.  When I needed a verse on that days lesson, one would pop into my head.  Bible school had grounded  me in scripture.  God supplied the rest.

Scripture started to become real to me.  "I am an ever present God in times of trouble."  And teaching a class of young girls was troubling.  I began to realize that not everyone came from families that believed in God.    (Continued.) 

How I had gotten myself into such a fix was a long story.  My new husband had spent two tours as a fighter pilot in Korea and returned to the training command in Pensacola to teach cadets how to land on a carrier.  Five days a week he waved them aboard and qualified--or disqualified--them in the final stage of flight training.  

Ten landings on the carrier and they were qualified.  On a pitching, rolling deck.  Some of them didn’t make it. They were washed out before they killed themselves, or more seriously, killed their instructor.  As long as there was sunlight, Ken was working on the carrier.  Waving "nuggets" aboard.  Every night he came home dead tired.  After three months of this, I was so homesick that I got on a bus and went back to Oklahoma.   (Continued)