The life of a military family is full of ups and downs. Great assignments, tough jobs, deployments, new doctors, packing, moving, friends, family.

For the last two years we have been living in a multi-family apartment building in central Germany. This heightens both the challenges and rewards of being an Army family living on an  Army post. On Monday I lost my best, best Army-wife-mom friend. She lived in the same stairwell as me, we had children of similar ages who got along swimmingly. We shared values and passions for reading and being outdoors. We lived through a miscarriage, emergency room visits, a deployment, a two-week trip to Rome and countless family struggles together. Our husbands work late hours, so we regularly spent three hours together on some playground or other in the afternoons. She was my female sanity check, she grounded me. She had a way of saying the same thing my husband was trying to get across to me, but making it more palatable.

So, on Monday she headed back across the Atlantic, with her family of five in tow. My pantry is full of her condiments, dry pastas and diet sodas, but the shelves of my life seem to have gaping holes without her. I know that the richness of our families’ friendship has enriched us all for the long haul, but sometimes the near term seems so bleak. I ask for your prayers for everyone’s healthy adjustments to our new situations