Thank you for your service...
Yesterday,or maybe the day before, a member here commented on one of my posts. Although I'm not good at understanding sarcasm, the comment felt ouchy. I replied the best I could with my cognitive issues, but something still didn't feel right,so I went to his profile and looked at a couple of posts. I could tell he was hurting. Then last night my daughter wanted to watch a movie called "Hacksaw Ridge" and I thought, great, another war movie. I must admit I don't always enjoy watching them, but I am usually outvoted by my family. This movie was different, maybe because I was interacting with a veteran here a little bit.
Elohim has always had a way of taking my blinders off when I am being a fool due to ignorance. This is what happened last night. As I watched the movie, as I saw the men being wounded, the courage they all had, the suffering they were all going through, on a large screen TV with speakers all around me. Elohim took this moment to rip out my heart and slap me in the face with it.
All of a sudden, I could see what a complete and total ass I have been all my life. Not on purpose, I mean I thought I was doing good. I thought I was a kind, caring person. I considered myself somewhat unselfish, but this isn't the truth. The truth is that I have always been focused on just what I was living through.
If I saw a homeless person, I gave them some money and thought to myself how I wish I could do more. However, I didn't really let my heart bleed and hurt for them, you know, like it should have. It has been the same with veterans. I say thank you for your service out of respect, but I didn't know what I was saying thank you for exactly. I knew I should, I knew that they fought for our country, but I didn't understand what this meant, really. Well, I got an education last night.
These people sacrifice so much for people who don't always seem to appreciate it. Some give up their lives with the death of their physical bodies, but even the ones who live, laid down their lives for us. The life they would have known, had they not joined the military (if they saw and dealt with traumatic things), means the life they would have had before experiencing trauma was forever gone. No one who experiences trauma is ever the same again. What did they do that? What makes us worth their sacrifice? Nothing. We could never pay them back for what they have given us. There is no measure of anything worth as much as they gave. Yet, they don't ask to be paid back. They didn't do it, so we would owe them. They did it because they are the real people who think of others before themselves, and they believe our country and our values are worth fighting for.
However, I think they deserve far more than they get when they come home. They deserve to always have a home, enough money to get by( at the very least), their medical needs met for free, and most of all, they deserve to have the people they sacrificed so much for mean it when they say, "Thank you for your service." They deserve every heart that they sacrificed so much for, to at least have hearts full of complete gratitude. They deserve to know we have taken the time to really see what they did for us, how they suffered and how they suffer still, how we don't deserve what they did, how all the rights we take for granted would be gone without them, and so so so much more.
They deserve our hearts to be broken, until we can feel the tiniest amount of their pain, but what they get is people like me saying" Thanks for your service," in a detached manner, because you're supposed to. You know a somewhat famous man once said, long ago,"Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends."
No greater love has been given to me, and when I used to say "Thanks for your service!" it wasn't with love. It was with respect that I had been taught was the right thing to do. I do respect veterans, now more than I ever did, but love is what I needed to have and what those words needed to hold.
I only have the beautiful life I have because so many have made sacrifices for ME. I am not worthy of what they have given. None of us are, but at the very least, we can do whatever it takes to wake up, to stop being blind, to stop being self-centered enough to see what they have done for us, and the price they have had to pay.
I answered a question a while back about what movie changed my life. The answer I gave was terrible. I said "Fried Green Tomatoes" because that movie made me realize that I could be just a little more than the good submissive wife I had been. I still am a good submissive wife, but I found my voice a little because of the movie. I also found out that hormones made everyone crazy. I had to start hormones after my hysterectomy at 21, and this knowledge helped me. I should have answered ( at that time) The Passion because that one shook me up too. It wasn't life-changing because I already knew what I believed, but the movie showed the degree of suffering in a way I never forgot. Now, though, I'd like to change my answer. The movie that has forever changed me is called "Hacksaw Ridge".
I think that some of my blindness is because I have not had anyone really close to me go into the military. I had 2 uncles who were drafted during Vietnam, and a brother-in-law who was drafted too. When my uncle came home, he had been a medic, and he wasn't ok. He would have nightmares about all he had been through, and in the daytime, he couldn't keep the thoughts out of his mind. He was my favorite uncle. I had no father, and this uncle loved me in the right kind of way. As an uncle should love his niece. Not like the rest of my family loved me. I loved him with all my heart. When I was 9 years old, he killed himself. This was just 2-3 years after he came back. We got the news the day I woke up from my near-death experience. I had thios near-death experience because my family held me down so my stepfather could rape me. After that, I stabbed myself in the arm several times and experienced a near-death experience from it. The day I woke up was the day we got the call that my uncle was dead. This all had a profound effect on me, but one that I had let fall to the back of my mind as I lived out my life-long love with my Husband and kids. I couldn't understand, because I was a kid, why my uncle left me, and I missed him so much. They made me go see him at the funeral home. He had an open coffin, and I just lost it completely. I got hysterical, and they dragged me out of the funeral home. Needless to say, I didn't go to the funeral.
So, this is why I am so disappointed in myself. I saw firsthand some of the pain, and didn't understand it enough, to make me see all of what I have just written above. It should have, but it didn't. I like to think I am a good person, but I am not so sure a blind, ignorant person is a good person. I wanted to write this all down better, but I still have quaze in my mouth from surgery, and my writing skills are somewhat minimal. If anyone out there can understand what I have written, and it makes their hearts bleed, humbles their minds, and changes their lives, so that the next time they say, "Thank you for your services," they mean it straight from the heart, then I will have succeeded in what I was trying to do here.
What I have written doesn't apply to everyone. Some people have done much better with this, than I have, but to those who have been like me, we need to do better.
