{"id":361,"date":"2008-10-10T12:12:07","date_gmt":"2008-10-10T12:12:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/stevenwaldman\/2008\/10\/i-had-to-spend-fourteen-months.html"},"modified":"2008-10-10T12:12:07","modified_gmt":"2008-10-10T12:12:07","slug":"i-had-to-spend-fourteen-months","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/stevenwaldman\/2008\/10\/i-had-to-spend-fourteen-months.html","title":{"rendered":"“I had to spend fourteen months in Iraq, while dealing with tragedy”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Another stunning and wise posts on my piece about the death of Joe Biden’s wife and baby daughter.<\/a> This is from AnotherBeliever:<\/p>\n

I am not a parent, so God knows I did not face that level of pain. But I, too, traveled some dark roads this year. I had to spend fourteen months in Iraq, while dealing with tragedy. My grandfathers both passed away within months, pain enough. But so did my Dad. He was only 46. It was like a nightmare, I kept hoping to wake up from. To this day, I can’t really believe that I am going back home to the States, and that I will not see him there.
\nI could go on. If it’s happened to you, there’s no need to. If it hasn’t, you can’t know what it’s like. The pain has barely faded in its intensity. It just comes less frequently, a year and a half later. I thought some dark thoughts this year. But I could never leave my brothers and mother to face more of the pain than they’ve already had to. I talked it out with professionals. Mostly I’ve just endured it. I’m back from the brink, or at least as back as I’m ever going to be.
\nBut I also realize how fragile I am, how fragile the well-being of all of us really are. I am religious, so I state this with conviction, even if I don’t mean it quite literally: dark things howl about us, all the time. Most of us are shielded from them, most of the time. But it is a great mystery to me, that God should permit them to be at all, and that he should permit us to experience their presence when we are at our lowest, and defenseless. I have heard no satisfactory explanation for it, though it is some small comfort that Jesus is said to have experienced it himself when he walked this Earth.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Another stunning and wise posts on my piece about the death of Joe Biden’s wife and baby daughter. This is from AnotherBeliever: I am not a parent, so God knows I did not face that level of pain. But I, too, traveled some dark roads this year. 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