My Story Through Songs #3
Thanks for joining me again for another installment My Story Through Songs! I do hope you’re enjoying these as we all know that music is an extremely powerful tool in our lives. I’ll confess that the process of writing these posts has been somewhat difficult because it’s caused me to be way more introspective than I am normally.
As the song featured today emphasizes, there are times when we do need to remember what God has done in our lives as we move forward relying on His faithfulness. We will remember the works of Your hands. We will stop and give You praise, for great is Your faithfulness.
11 1/2 years ago, we found out Fort Bliss, located in the center of El Paso, TX, would be the very first place the Army would send our family. At the time we only had 2 kids. Bailey was 2 and MavCole was almost 3 months old on moving day. Oh, good grief! Have you ever taken a 3 day trip with a hungry, fussy almost 3-month-old?
My mom and I converted our trip from South Carolina to El Paso from a 3 day trip to a 2-day trip because we couldn’t stand the thought of taking the 2 and under crowd into another hotel room. Pure pandemonium! Maj W was shocked when I called him from my flip phone and told him we could see the lights on the east side of El Paso, a full day earlier than our original plan.
El Paso was low on our list of places we wanted to go! I can honestly say that I was initially devastated! I pictured just a really slummy, ghetto, run-down desert town. I imagined the whole city would look like Juarez, the Mexican city that shares a border with El Paso.
Did you know that El Paso is one of the only cities in TX in the Mountain Time Zone? It’s 635 miles from Dallas and 320 miles from Tucson. It is basically an island in the middle of the desert! Did you also know that El Paso has been ranked one of the safest cities compared to other cities with a population of over 300,000? That was a surprising statistic to me, considering the unrest right across the border.
Upon arrival in”the west Texas town of El Paso,” we immediately went on the church hunt. Because Maj W had been in El Paso a few weeks before we arrived, he had visited a few places and had already ruled a couple out. Our first visit as a family was to First Baptist Church El Paso (FBCEP). We weren’t feeling all the warm fuzzies initially, so we visited another church the next week. I’ll not name this church because my feelings were not positive at all!
I was already a total basket case and the people at the children’s check-in desk had no clue what to do with us. Since we had an infant and a toddler, their rooms were in two different buildings, and getting to the infant class for Maverick was like driving the wrong way in a traffic jam in downtown Atlanta! And most people know how I feel about driving through Atlanta. Y’all, church “shopping” for lack of a better term, is not for the faint of heart! It’s hard to be new, even within the 4 walls of a church!
*Dear churches of the world – If you want families to return to your church, they need to feel confident in your ability to keep their children safe and secure! Their first contact needs to be with someone who is helpful and knowledgeable about the church’s facility and the location of the classrooms for their children. If you fail this first impression, you are more than likely not gaining a member or regular attender.*
After that disastrous morning, we went back to FBCEP and decided to just go all in! Honestly, we couldn’t handle any more emotional Sunday mornings! That week, I contacted the music minister at the time, Jim, in regards to joining the choir and other opportunities to serve in the music ministry. Here’s what really won us over to FBCEP!
Jim treated our family to McDonald’s one Sunday after church. We warned him that we had little kids who have a 3-second attention span so we settled on lunch at McDonald’s! Seriously. Any minister who is willing to eat a Big Mac while getting to know my family ranks high in my book. Through that lunch, we discovered we had some mutual connections and he immediately helped me get plugged in. Jim became a good friend to our family over the course of the 3 and a half years we spent in El Paso.
We plugged into FBCEP at an interesting time in the church’s history. Our first summer there, they spent most of the summer celebrating their 125th Anniversary. It was like the celebration that went on and on and on. Piano dedications and concerts. Luncheons. Cookbooks. Pictorial Directories. You name it, they did it!
Even though we had only been on the scene there for about 4 months, Jim asked me if I would help lead one of the choir specials for the big Sunday morning celebration service. It was an honor to be asked, but it spoke volumes of Jim’s love for people and his desire to give people opportunities to use their gifts. The song for the morning was one called “We Will Remember.” Very appropriately, the person who penned the words to the song, Tommy Walker, had roots in El Paso. The words became life-giving to me!
Those first few months there were hard. Truth be told, I probably suffered from undiagnosed postpartum depression. On top of that, we had been uprooted from our very comfortable life in the South to a city 1600 miles away, where half the city spoke a different language. I cried – a lot!
I spent many days just driving the kids around while Maj W was at work. Some driving for sanity; Some driving because the van had air conditioning! If anyone ever tries to tell you the pros of a “Swamp Cooler” or “Evaporative Cooling,” plug your ears!
Our first house on post had a Swamp Cooler and I have never been so hot in my life! Our master bedroom had a west-facing, cinder block exterior wall so after it had been baked by the sun all day, we’d lay down to go to sleep and could feel the heat radiating off of that wall. It was miserable! I’ve never been so hot in my life. Did I say that already? We survived and often laugh about that summer any time we complain about being hot.
I really questioned our sanity for signing up for this whole Army thing. I even demanded to be able to fly back to SC to visit my friends. I only did that alone once! You can read about that here.
That first year I spent asking myself questions like
What on earth have we done?
Who on earth am I?
What value do I bring to this new reality?
I had to cling to the proclamations of this song – Jesus is our comfort, our joy, our sustainer, our deliverer, our shelter, and so much more. I was forced to remember the call that was on our lives and that I had surrendered my life to God and was committed to following Him daily. Above all, Jesus bought my life through His own death, which is reason enough to go where He calls. He’s promised to never leave me, regardless of the mess I am capable of making out of this life.
Eventually, the city and people of El Paso grew on us, and to this day have a very special place in our hearts. We learned the value of the totality of the Army family. Military families take care of one another.
The day the movers came to drop off our household goods (HHG in military-speak), a woman whom I had spoken to once before showed up at my house and took the boys to childcare at a weekly Protestant Women of the Chapel (PWOC) meeting so I could have a little bit of a break while the movers unloaded box after box after box into our house. I often wonder if I would be that trusting today! To this day, I can’t even remember this lady’s name!
People who live in the military community have a unique perspective on life and understand that people around us need help, even if our relationships with one another are somewhat shallow. We began to understand that the people we would live and do life with come from varied and diverse backgrounds. Relationships with other military families were formed in those 3 1/2 years in El Paso that have proven valuable and deep and remain intact to this day.
At some point during our first year there, I was given the opportunity to serve as the interim children’s ministry director at FBCEP. The 3 years I spent in that capacity are 3 years I will treasure always. I learned tons about myself, my abilities, and a whole lot about my weaknesses! We were there in that city, in that church, at just the right time, a period I believe was totally orchestrated by God.
Regardless of how difficult or trying those days in the desert of West Texas were, we always knew our Savior was taking care of our every need. He called us. He loved us. He’ll never leave us and we’ll never be the same!
If nothing else, I hope you can close your browser encouraged that whatever you are going through, whatever hard time you’re facing, know that one day you will be able to look back and see that God got you through it. It may not be today or tomorrow, but one day you will remember the faithfulness of your sovereign God even in the midst of whatever your dark valley moments are.
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