By Angela Caban

I had the wonderful opportunity to chat with Sara Horn. She has been a Navy Reservist spouse for 11 years and is the author of “God Strong: The Military Wife’s Spiritual Survival Guide” and founder of Wives of Faith. Sara also writes frequently for Military Spouse Magazine and many other web sites. In this interview, Sara shares a bit about her military life and her upcoming book projects as well the importance of her faith.

As a Navy Reservist’s wife for 12 years, what has been the biggest challenge for you and your family?

 Cliff has been a Seabee with the Navy Reserves for 13 and I’m very proud of him. There are two big challenges I think we face as Reserve and Guard families. The first we share with active and that would have to be deployments. Deployments are difficult for everyone but for Guard and Reserve, we can definitely experience the “fish out of water” sensation. We’re usually nowhere near the respective units where our husbands are attached and if a Guard or Reserve member is deployed as an IA (Individual Augmentee), we sometimes aren’t even sure who to contact if we need help with anything. Being in civilian communities but living the military life can be very challenging and very lonely if you let it be. But thank goodness for the Internet and all of the different ways we have now to be connected with other spouses who understand!

The second challenge is just managing the juggle of it all. Just because my husband is only at his base one weekend a month doesn’t mean he’s not working during the week on Navy duties. As the training coordinator for his det, he’s constantly on the computer or the phone. That and the extra trainings he often has to go to on top of his civilian job (he currently freelances from home) can make for a lot to keep up with. Flexibility is a must and being willing to roll with whatever happens is important too, like accepting the fact that holidays and special occasions are going to be missed. My husband was away for training this year the week of my birthday and our son’s, and he’s away this weekend for a drill as I write this.

What is something that people can do for military wives within the community?

Wives need to know they’re not alone. And that they’re not on their own if they don’t want to be. One of the best things someone ever did for me was to ask me to make a list of honey-do jobs I needed help with. She then brought her entire church group over to the house and did the entire list! But it wasn’t even so much that the work got done, it was that a group of strangers cared enough to come around me and let me know I wasn’t alone. That someone else appreciated the sacrifice my family was making while my husband was away serving our country.

Summer time is especially hard for wives dealing with deployments because you’ve got the yard to contend with as well as kids out of school and underfoot. Churches could host Friday night dinners and invite military wives and their kids going through deployment to come and enjoy a meal and some fellowship with others who understand. Men’s groups and civic clubs could adopt military families and offer to take care of yard work or drop off dinner or gift cards periodically. Women’s groups could reach out and have a Mom’s Timeout and offer to watch the children of military wives and let the moms have a couple of hours to themselves. All you have to do is put yourself in the place of a military wife and think about what might be hard.
 

What type of advice would you give other military wives, who are enduring their first deployment? 

First, I would say that it’s going to be ok. That deployment doesn’t last forever and your husband will come home and life will continue on. But that also, deployment is not the time to try and be superwoman. For some reason as military wives, we convince ourselves that we have to do and be everything for and to everyone when a deployment happens, a thought we would never even consider if our husbands were home, and deployment is the hardest time to try and do that! So I would say….practice more patience and do less ironing. Take more breaks and cook more microwaveable dinners. If you have kids, keep them in their routines and resist the urge to let them do whatever they want because it’s easier that way. Refuse to enter the waiting room known as “When he gets home” and keep moving. Keep doing. Leave guilt at the door and commit to doing the best you can. Practice love with your husbands. Not the longing-filled, I-miss-you-and-you-haven’t-called-so-you-must-not-love-me-anymore love – but the I’m-here-for-you-and-know-you’ll-call-me-when-you-can kind of love. Make time for yourself and exercise because physical activity not only helps you from gaining 20 pounds before your husband returns, but it’s a great stress reliever. Try not to give into the feeling of pushing pause until the deployment is over but look for what you can do to grow, to learn and to live so that when your husband comes home and you’re in his arms once again, he doesn’t see you just as he remembers, but as better than he remembers.

How has your son Caleb, handled the overall deployment process?

Caleb was six when our first overseas deployment happened and the first month Cliff was in Iraq was probably the hardest. He had gotten used to the web cam and phone calls while Cliff was in California training with his battalion, but when he left for Iraq, he was tasked with a Special Forces group and web cam and pictures weren’t allowed and the phone calls usually came at night when Caleb was asleep. So he soon started complaining about tummy aches and having what I called melt-downs. And I finally got him to talk to me and he told me he had been having nightmares that his dad had been shot. I was able to get Cliff to get a photo of him driving a bulldozer approved and emailed to Caleb and once Caleb saw his dad wearing a construction hat, (one of the two hats Seabees wear, anyway) the nightmares stopped and he did better.

I think as moms, it’s important to model the right attitude for our kids – if we walk around in despair the entire time, so will they. But if we shed a tear or two and acknowledge that we’re sad or we miss our loved one, but pick up and keep going, and hopefully so will our kids.

We’re actually getting ready for Cliff’s second deployment this fall which we haven’t told Caleb about yet. Being a little older, yet remembering what the first one was like, I expect this one may be a little tougher for him, especially with us just having moved to a new area. But the key I think will be to plan things that will keep us focused on the positives and prepare for coping with the hard parts.    

What inspired you to reach out military spouses through your writing?

I first started writing about the military as a journalist when I took two trips over to the Middle East in 2003 with my photographer to do stories of Christians serving in Iraq. I was on board the USS Harry S. Truman the first week of the war and then in November of that same year in Baghdad. After interviewing soldiers on the ground, I came home and interviewed their spouses. So by the time my own husband got ready to deploy, I had already been doing quite a bit of writing about the military so it was a pretty natural progression as I started writing about the military (I did a book with Oliver North called A Greater Freedom: Stories of Faith from Operation Iraqi Freedom that released in 2004), and specifically for military spouses.

When Cliff got ready to deploy and I was searching for answers to my questions, I grew very frustrated at the resources that were available at the time that were written by military wives; in an effort to capture realism, there seemed to me to be a lot of negative stories and very little that focused or offered hope. I guess you could say I’m a glass half full kind of gal and my writing reflects that. We need to know and be able to deal with the challenges but we don’t need to bog ourselves down in them. There are too many other wonderful opportunities and things for us to do.

What is the biggest challenge you face as a military spouse?

I think my biggest challenge personally is the juggling, no matter what season of life we’re in, deployment or not. Balancing my goals and dreams with that of my husband’s as well as our little boy’s can be hard. The longer we are married, though, it gets a little easier to do because I think we see the things that really matter over the things that really don’t and we have learned about working together but it wasn’t too long ago, probably around the 7 or 8 year mark, when that was a serious struggle for me. I had my own ideas on how things should be and didn’t like it when that plan got altered! I’ve really had to learn the definition of “going with the flow!” Don’t get me wrong, though – I still have not mastered this. Not by a long shot. But I’m working on it.

Could you talk a little about Wives of Faith, and how important this community is for military spouses?

Sure! It’s my favorite thing TO talk about! Wives of Faith is a faith-based military wives organization I started at the end of 2006 with a friend who was an Army wife at the time. We’re open to active, Guard and Reserve wives and our focus and mission is to encourage military wives to grow spiritually in their walks with God. We can’t do this military life without Him! So we have a website that we use to post encouraging articles for wives written by wives and we also have local groups that meet in different cities around the country. Our goal right now is to see 10 new groups start in 2010 and I’m excited to say that we are on our way to reaching that goal. We currently have four groups actively meeting – one is in Ventura County, California near Port Hueneme, and the other three are in the Nashville/Middle TN area where Wives of Faith began. But we do have potential groups looking at starting this fall in Lexington, KY, San Diego, CA and possibly Alabama!

Some of the services we currently offer is a Prayer Ministry that women can submit prayer requests to and our prayer team will pray for them, and we also have a program called Survival Sisters that we use to match up military wives together in pairs. Last year was our first year to do it and we hope to do it again this year, but we plan on changing the length of the program from 10 weeks to 6 weeks beginning with our next semester which start this fall.

I think it’s extremely important that military wives have a community of other wives to lean on. First, it’s helpful to hear that other women deal with the same types of things and that you’re not crazy! And also, it can be helpful to have others who can put things into perspective for you when your emotions may be prone to clouding your judgment. And above all, it’s great to have others who share your faith and won’t just offer to pray for you, but know how to pray for you.

I would say that women who visit our site or attend a WoF group will find a positive place of encouragement, where they can share their problems and find others who share their beliefs in Christ and will pray and support one another. We have a lot of dreams and goals for the ministry and we just achieved a big one – we’ve been accepted as a ministry under Logos Global Network which gives us non-profit status. This will help us raise the funds we need to move forward in seeing some of the other dreams we have become reality.

What do you think that readers will take with them after reading your book, God Strong: The Military Wife’s Spiritual Survival Guide?

Well, I hope that the biggest thing they take away is the importance of leaning on God for everything and that they will find a sense of relief in the knowledge or the reminder that they don’t have to do it all on their own – that they’re not supposed to do it on their own. In the book, I cover just about all of the issues we deal with as military wives – the need to be strong, the struggles with fear, loneliness, feeling like we have to be superwomen and what it means to have joy despite my circumstances just to name a few. They’re all part of nine spiritual truths I think every military wife should know.

How does faith play a part in your military lifestyle?

Well, faith for me as a person plays a huge part, so it plays a huge part for me as a military wife as well. I’m passionate about my relationship with God and I know that without Him, I could not do the things I’m doing or overcome the challenges we’ve experienced. Not everyone knows this, but my husband was laid off from his full-time job six months after he got back from his first deployment and for two years he has looked for full-time work. He is currently freelancing and working as a consultant from home, but there have definitely been some hard moments we’ve experienced and had to work through! But we’ve seen God provide and bring help when it was needed and our relationships with Him and with each other have only grown closer. It’s that peace and joy God gives me that is something I want to make sure other military wives also experience and so every chance I get, I want to share God’s love with others and remind those who already have relationships with God to keep Him close and not push Him away. I think we often convince ourselves we can do it all on our own and only call on God for the “big” stuff; when things get overwhelming or scary. But God wants to be there for the little stuff too. So it’s a daily action of giving everything over to Him to handle. Not always easy, but always important.

Tell us a little bit about your work life; is there a new book in the future?

The first one is something very different than what I’ve ever done before, but it goes along with what I was saying earlier about trying to find that balance between my goals and dreams and that of my husband’s and family’s. It’s called My So-Called Life as a Proverbs 31 Wife: An Experiment in Spiritual Domestic Tranquility. I’ve made a commitment to myself to follow what’s in Proverbs 31:10-31 in an effort to grow as a better wife and mom. So I’m writing about my experiences as I attempt this – which could be scary since I have no idea how to sew and I’m not that great a cook! I guess you could describe it as part humor, part social commentary on what it means to be a wife and mom today. That book comes out the middle of next year and is being published by Harvest House.

The second book is one I’m working on right now and it’s a Bible study specifically for military wives going through deployment. I want to help each of us understand and prepare for the different emotional geographical areas we find ourselves in as we go through this journey we call deployment. I can’t release much more detail than that because we’re still waiting for the contract to be processed and finalized, but I can tell you the tentative title right now is Tour of Duty: A Military Wife’s Spiritual Journey through Deployment (the subtitle will probably change). I also continue to write a column for Military Spouse Magazine and of course, for Wives of Faith.

 

Can you talk about your recent interview for Focus on the Family?

It was such a fun, cool experience! First, I’d never been to that part of Colorado before and it was beautiful and the Focus on the Family campus was beautiful too. My husband and son both got to come with me and Caleb had a blast playing in Whit’s End, the kid area they’ve set up to resemble the Adventures in Odyssey series. I was interviewed by all three of the regular hosts including the president; Dr. Jim Daly who was appointed after Dr. Dobson stepped down. We first went to Dr. Daly’s office for a quick meeting and prayer and then we walked downstairs to the studio which is located in the administrative building and has a set of chairs outside for folks to sit and watch if they like. Once I was seated in the chair at the table and started hearing John Fuller doing the intro, it was very surreal. I’ve heard his voice so many times on the Focus on the Family broadcasts and now I was sitting next to him!

The interview itself went well I think, though the questions tended to jump from place to place which I found a bit challenging so I hope they make it all sound right in the editing room. J We talked about the challenges and needs military wives face as well as what the community can do to help support military families. The toughest question they asked me was what to say to a spouse who has lost her husband in combat. That was a hard question to answer since I’ve never had the experience and I’m not sure I answered it very well. We talked a little bit about GOD Strong and before I knew it, it was over! It’s scheduled to air July 6-7.

For more on Sara Horn you may find her on Facebook, Twitter, her website SaraHorn.com and Wives of Faith.

Sara Horn on Facebook – Struggles of a Military Wife