Finding Strength in Sweet, Simple Surrender

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A MESSAGE FROM ANNE PURCELL:

Many years ago, I married a 2nd Lieutenant in the U.S. Army. We moved to his duty station in South Carolina, set up housekeeping, joined a church and six weeks later he received orders to go to Korea. We packed our few belongings and said our goodbyes. He went to war and I went back to college. We communicated through letters and stayed connected through prayer. We missed our first anniversary together but God watched over us and after thirteen months Ben safely returned home.   

Upon his return, we settled into married life at our new station in Fort Benning, Georgia. We attended the post chapel and made lots of new friends. Fourteen months later the Army sent us to California. We pulled a 31-square foot mobile home across country and settled into a lovely mobile home park. Again, one of the first things we did was join a local church. Christian worship and fellowship were central to our lives. Ben and I both grew up in the church and our faith was important to us. So was family.

Our first child was due two months after we arrived in California. Three days before our son, David, was born I received a phone call telling me my father had died. I was devastated. I was an only child and my daddy’s little girl. He was my nurturer, protector and friend. No one could make me laugh quite like my daddy did. There had always been a special bond between us and now suddenly, all too suddenly and unexpectedly, he was gone. I cried for my loss and cried for my Dad because he would never get to meet his first grandchild. Because I was so late into my pregnancy the doctors would not allow me to fly home for his funeral so I said my goodbyes from three-thousand miles away. It was the hardest thing I had faced up to that point in my life.

I surrendered my broken heart to God and He gave me the strength and the peace I needed to endure.

After fourteen months in California, Ben was again reassigned — this time to Alabama. We made a new home, joined a new church and welcomed our second child, Clarice. She was a happy, sweet, loving child and was thrilled to become a big sister when our third child, Debbie, was born. As our family grew God’s blessings in our lives multiplied. Motherhood and military life posed challenges but God tempered those challenges with His abiding love and grace.

I did not know how crucial those Godly gifts would become in my life until new, unimaginable challenges surfaced.

The first of those challenges was a life-altering diagnosis. Our precious daughter, Clarice, was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis when she was just 21-months old. Treatment for the disease was nowhere near as advanced as it is today, and Clarice was treated with steroids. It was more than her little body could take.

Two years after her diagnosis, while we were stationed in France, Clarice suffered a flare-up and was hospitalized. It was during this time that I gave birth to our fourth child, Cliff. Ben wheeled Clarice to the nursery to visit her new baby brother. She was amazed at the sight of his tiny hands and feet. I was amazed at her resilient, kind spirit; she was so sick but still smiling and always thinking of others. Some friends brought her candy and she evenly counted out the pieces to share with her siblings. I remember thinking how selfless she was and found myself wanting her to be more selfish. Life had taken so much from her I didn’t feel she should have to give anything else away.

But in her selflessness she taught me a lesson: it is not what happens to us in life but how we deal with it that counts.

Less than two weeks after meeting her baby brother, Clarice slipped into a coma and died. The medication had affected her heart. In the end, it was the treatment — not the disease — that took her from us. Cliff was just two weeks old when Clarice died and the doctors would not allow me to travel home to Georgia to bury her, so Ben flew alone.

As hard as it was for me to stay behind it was much harder on him flying eleven hours on a military cargo plane beside our daughter’s casket. The memories. The dreams. She was just four years old.

While Ben grieved alone on the plane ride to Georgia and laid our daughter to rest, I balanced my grief against the needs and demands of a newborn. God gave me hope through His word. I found comfort in the verse from Job,

“God giveth and God taketh away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.”

In the wake of my daughter’s death, I again surrendered my broken heart to God and he granted me strength and the amazing peace he provides that “passes all understanding.”

Other duty stations in Kansas and Missouri followed, and two more children brightened our lives. Sherri and Joy completed our family circle. Little did we know we were about to face another, unimaginable challenge.

In 1967, Ben received orders for Vietnam. He was to be gone one year. We prayed about where the children and I should live while he was away, and we felt God wanted us to remain in Missouri. On August 27, 1967, the children and I drove Ben to the airport in Kansas City and said our goodbyes. Tears freely flowed as the children hugged him goodbye and Ben and I shared a parting kiss.

From the moment his plane left the ground our countdown to his homecoming began. Each day we marked another day off the calendar. 365 days…250 days…200 days…then it stopped. On February 12, 1968 I received a message that changed me and my world.

Ben was reported as “missing.”

God had always been a part of our lives…now He was my lifeline.

Our Sunday School lessons that month were from the book of James. Each Sunday my soul was fed with James’ words. One verse in particular jumped out at me. “If you want to know what God wants you to do ask Him.” So I did.

One morning while sitting alone on my bed I asked God what to do. A firm, yet gentle voice spoke to me. It said, “Go to Columbus, Georgia, and wait.” We did. For years I had criss-crossed the country with Ben by my side, now it was just the children and me. We returned to Columbus, Georgia, near Fort Benning and made a new life.

From the beginning, it was clear we had made the right move. We joined a church and got involved in school and the community. The children quickly made new friends, many of whom had father’s in the military. Because of their own families’ experiences, these new friends understood better than most the emotional impact of war. God gave me friends who made me laugh. He blessed me with a friend who became my prayer warrior and He gave me a purpose. I taught pre-school at our church and became a founding member of the League of Families which worked to raise public awareness about the plight of American MIAs and POWs in Vietnam.

Still, the busyness of our lives did not diminish the great sense of loss we felt every time we sat down at the dinner table and saw Ben’s empty chair.

The busyness of our lives did not ease the emptiness I felt sleeping alone at night nor curb the pangs of sadness my children felt when they missed a Daddy/Daughter dance or searched for their father’s face in the stands during a game.

Ben was gone but still ever present and the burdens of worry and fear finally became more than I could bear. Eight months passed before I realized – and accepted – that there was nothing I could do about my situation but pray. So, I did. I prayed this simple, heart felt prayer:

“Lord, I do not know where Ben is, but you do. I love him, but you love him even more. I want him to come home but I will accept this the way you want it to turn out.”

From that moment on I knew without a doubt that God was in control.

It was another four-and-a-half years after praying that prayer before I saw my husband again. He was released at the end of the war along with 590 other American POWs. We were reunited on the tarmac at Bush Field at Fort Gordon in Augusta, Georgia on March 27, 1973. It was a glorious day!

Our oldest child, who was 13 when Ben left for Vietnam, was a freshman at West Point and our youngest, who was 21-months old when he left, was 7 years old. The years had aged and changed us all. Reunion was easy but reconnecting was hard, especially for the children. We’d lived for 5.5 years without Ben, and we had to find a way to integrate him back into our lives.

For his part, Ben had lived in solitary confinement during most of his captivity and he had to learn to adapt to a household bustling with teens, tweens and wanna-bes. For all the challenges we faced after his return, nothing compared to the challenge of living five years not knowing if he was dead or alive.

In time we all found our place in the family and made our peace with the war. We know we are blessed because unlike so many, Ben made it home alive. We are grateful to God for getting us through that difficult time and are more mindful now of other people’s suffering because of it.

Ben retired from the military in 1980. We returned to his hometown to live and joined his home church. We planted a Christmas tree farm, wrote a book and traveled the world sharing our testimony about how God saw us through those tumultuous years.

Through God’s grace we were able to turn five years of hardship into forty years of ministry. What a gift. What a joy.

In 2010 Ben was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and slowly lost his ability to speak. We gave up the speaking engagements and stayed close to home. This once strong, independent husband of mine came to depend on me like a child. Watching him fade away was excruciatingly painful but I surrendered the situation to God and He again granted me the strength I needed to endure.

One way He did that was by reassuring me of Ben’s love. You see, even in the shadows of his lost memories and speech Ben never lost “us.” Several times each day he would take my hands, look into my eyes and clearly say, “I love you.” They were the only words he spoke regularly the last six months of his life but they were the words I needed to hear…the words I longed to hear…and God knew that.

On April 2, 2013, after 62 years of marriage, my husband – the love of my life – went home to be with the Lord. I feel like half of me is missing but God has helped me fill the void with wonderful memories of our life together. My life has been enriched by so many blessings I cannot count them all. Yes, there have been trials and deep heartaches along the way but there is also this abiding truth:

When we found that we had nothing left but God, we found that God was enough.

How do you survive the death of a parent, the loss of a child, the agony of war and separation, and the illness and loss of a spouse? How do you survive any of the hardships and challenges life throws your way? I suppose it’s different for everyone but for me it comes down to one thing…

Sweet. Simple. Surrender. It’s where I find my strength.

More accurately, it’s where I find God and where He gives me my strength. In those moments when I trust Him most and give him everything He in turn gives me exactly what I need.

He did it that day in Columbus when I prayed the prayer of relinquishment.

He did it that day in Boonville, Missouri, when I asked Him what He wanted me to do.

He did it those days in France and California when I handed Him my broken heart after the deaths of my daughter and father.

And He did it again when Ben became ill and died.

Throughout my life in the most challenging of times it is when I surrender my pain, doubts, worries and fears to God that he gives me the strength to be bold, to carry on and to conquer.