It's Here!

Commissioning Week is here! This time next week, I'll be finishing up any last minute cleaning, Brian will be taking boxes to storage and we'll be preparing to check out of good ol' 1032. Today, though, in between scrubbing bathroom tiles and vacuuming out closets, I've found moments of stillness. Brief seconds in which I pause and take in everything around me. I see nails in the walls where we hung family photos, boxes of dishes and coffee cups that we've used to entertain friends at the drop of a hat, and two shepherd's staffs - given to us by the Principal - to remind us of the task that will soon be at hand. Those things won't be packed away. Partially, because they won't fit into any box, but mostly because it's a reminder that everything is starting to get real.

As we get ready to leave this place, those staffs will help us in every decision we have to make. Those staffs will help us guide those God will entrust to us. Those staffs will be used by the people that God has entrusted us to as well. In less than one month, we'll go from being cadets - with life handed to us in scheduled detail, to being ordained ministers - with life less scripted and more daring. This is what we've dreamt of our whole lives! This is our fairy tale!

But as we could get caught up in the excitement of the title, those staffs bring back beautiful words shared with us during our last Covenant Chapel - the day before signing our Officer's Covenant. The prayer is as follows:
Lord, is that all there is?
Do we spend two years here
Just for a splash of red and one tiny star?

No, God, I cannot believe
That You would have me labor
and pray and sweat it out
For such a transient objective.

There must be more than stars,
More than crests or even silver piping;
There must be more than Army politics,
More than a hoopla one Sunday in June.

Still, in our smallness,
We look forward to pomp and ceremony.
Our finite minds feel a need to
Strut and prance and preen.
We long, O Lord, for the "Day of Red Epaulets".

Oh, we know that epaulets
Don't mean a thing to a hungry family,
Or to a man, dead-drunk and bleary-eyed.
Epaulets don't keep the books or bale the rags.
Epaulets, in their own strength, cannot
Reach out and touch another human being.

Epaulets simply do not care.

No, it takes a person
Under the shoulders,
Under the tunic,
Under the epaulets,
To do these things.

Make us ready, O God,
To shoulder the burdens
That come with the splash of red
And the tiny star.

-Lesa Salyer Davis

...and I'd like to add, make us ready, O God, to live out this dream come true!