Podcast

Unexpected Joy in a Deployed Christmas. Lee and Kelly Hall

[00:00:00] Welcome to the Unshakable Hope Podcast, where real life intersects redeeming love. I’m Kellie Hall, and this is where we wrestle through faith questions, such as how do I trust God’s heart when His ways and delays are breaking mine? We’ll hear from people just like you and me, who have experienced God’s faithfulness when life didn’t unfold as they expected. My prayer is that God would renew our hope in His Word and His love through these conversations.

Kelly: Christmas 2023 is just a week away and today my husband Lee will actually be joining me and we’re going to be sharing about an unexpected Christmas deployment that happened 20 years ago and how we experienced the unexpected joy of the Lord during that time.

But first, before I introduce you to Lee, and I’m so excited he’s joining me today. It won’t be the last time, but today is the first time I want to explain how this particular podcast came to be. So a few weeks [00:01:00] ago, Lee and I were sorting through some disappointment. I’m just going to be honest with you.

It was some multi layered heartache involving a few different situations, but the biggest one involved our Christmas plans. We had planned to travel to Colorado, meet our daughter and her husband, but those plans fell apart due to the sudden decline in another daughter’s health. You’ve heard me talk about our sweet girl many times, and you’ve heard about the decades of prayer that have covered her life.

The disappointment we were dealing with wasn’t so much about a sudden change to our plans as it was just a piling on of years of hurting for her. I went to sleep praying, Lord, we’re so ready for breakthrough. I’m just so weary from all of this. I know you love our sweet girl. Make a way for her, make a way for us. Open our eyes to see this whole thing with your perspective. As I was slowly waking up the next morning, I became [00:02:00] aware of memories from a Christmas long past cycling through my mind.

As I scrolled through each one, I suddenly noticed I was smiling. Then a quiet chuckle escaped my throat, and next an unexpected tear formed in the corner of my eye. I was filled with joy. God had answered my prayer. I couldn’t wait to share all of these stories with my husband, so I ran downstairs.

He was getting ready for work, and one story after another spilled, and these memories had the same effect on him. Our weariness was lifted, and we were filled with the unexpected joy of the Lord and felt his presence. He lifted our eyes out of our circumstances and placed them on himself.

So we are both going to share these stories of joy with you. First of all, I just want to introduce you to my husband, lee, I’m so glad you’re here.

Lee: It’s my pleasure to be here. Kelly

Kelly: Lee is my biggest prayer partner. The chairman of my [00:03:00] board and the only member of my board and I’m greatly thankful for his support.

Back in 2003, Lee got word of a potential deployment and it was pretty last minute. I’m going to have him tell you about that.

Lee: Yeah, we were stationed at Hill Air Force Base in Utah and my commander came to me and said, hey, they need a group commander over at Bagram, Afghanistan, which was, at 1st, pretty exciting because, 9:11 had only happened about 2 years previous.

I hadn’t really had a chance to be involved much in that whole effort. I was excited but he said, but the bad news is it’s over Thanksgiving and Christmas. So you’ll miss all the holidays. And so that put a damper on my excitement, but after thinking about it for quite some time and talking to Kelly and praying about it I decided to go ahead and volunteer to go to Afghanistan.

Kelly: Yeah. Even though Lee had deployed so many times and we had been separated [00:04:00] for so many long periods of time, this was only going to be the second Christmas that we had missed being together. So it was a little disappointing, but we both sensed the Lord’s presence and sensed him inviting us into this.

I just suddenly had this thought: we’ll just celebrate Thanksgiving and Christmas next week and it won’t feel like we’re missing out on so much. And that’s what we did. We grocery shopped and had a full Thanksgiving meal, and then we set up the tree and we did all the Christmas shopping and this was before Amazon was such a big thing, I don’t know how it all worked out looking back. I can’t even believe it, but we set up the tree. We got all the presents under the tree. Then we did our traditional Christmas Eve thing with the kids; the next morning, they opened all their presents. And then we had a traditional Christmas meal,

Kelly: I couldn’t believe we had this beautiful [00:05:00] week of celebration right before Lee was going to deploy. And he’s going to catch you up on the next part of the story.

Lee: Yeah. So that night, the night after our Christmas night, my son and I went to my office and I had to pack all my gear for my trip to Afghanistan, I remember I asked David, David was very mechanical and enjoyed mechanical type tasks. While I was packing other things, I asked David to put the Kevlar shields into my flak vest and I looked at David and I said, I hope that this doesn’t scar you for life that on our Christmas night before your dad heads off to Afghanistan, you spend it with him packing his a flak vest with Kevlar. I don’t know. I’ll have to ask David sometime if he’s scarred from that, but I think he made it through just fine. Yeah,

Kelly: I think he loved it. That was fun for him to be a part of the packing. And I think that too, it lessened the sadness of you leaving.

You deployed and [00:06:00] I wanted to just share some of the highlights from those months that we were separated. First of all, why don’t you tell about what it was like for you?

Lee: Sure. Afghanistan, actually Bagram Air Base where I was the commander of the Air Force Expeditionary Group is actually a pretty location.

It reminds you a lot of Colorado surrounded by very tall peaks that are snow capped. And it’s just a very pretty location. The problem is we were at an Old Soviet airfield that they had built back when they occupied Afghanistan. And so the base was covered with landmines. You had to be very careful to avoid the areas that hadn’t been cleared and 24 hours a day you would hear landmines being exploded as they cleared the rest of the base from the landmine. So it was an austere environment, we lived in what were called little B huts. They were wood plywood huts that the local Afghanis built by hand. It was not[00:07:00] the Christmas we all dream about just like the ones we used to know, for sure.

I guess the some of my memories of the time in Afghanistan really there were a lot of young enlisted airmen there, many of them right out of high school away from home for the first time in their life, in a very far away and strange land.

And, it’s so easy to feel sorry for yourself and, woe is me. And I remember from years before when I was a young captain and Kelly and I were newly married and Kayla was six months old, I was in Korea for a year away from them. And I remember a Christmas, we had Christmas there.

And I remember our commanders. inviting a local orphanage, children from a local orphanage there in Korea to come onto the base and we fed them traditional Christmas food and they didn’t know quite what to do with that but it was fun. We gave them gifts, we loved on them, and it just got us out of ourselves.

No one really wanted to get up on [00:08:00] Christmas day and do that. But once we got there, it was turned out to be a real blessing. And so I had that modeled to me earlier in my career. And so when I was there at Bagram, I got a chance to put that principle of, getting out of ourselves and looking at the bigger picture…And then how did God want to work through this situation? And how can he be glorified in it? I was able to put that into practice.

And so I remember, on Christmas Eve, for example, we had we went around and we served hot cocoa and cookies to all the young airmen who were guarding, who the security forces airmen who were guarding the flight line and just talked to them and heard all of their stories and talked about some of their Christmas traditions and that.

And it was just a real blessing. Not only to them, but I think even more to us and I remember another time. This was right before Christmas. We had been attacked by some local insurgents with rockets on the base. And, people were pretty shaken up [00:09:00] by that. Again, some of these kids were 19 years old, 20 years old and and I decided, I think I’ll get everyone together.

And just chat about this and so we, we all gathered at the hangar there and and I was able to chat with the entire group and I asked them, I said, how many of you have ever had anyone try to kill you before? And, I was a little bit tongue in cheek…very few raised their hands.

And again, my goal was to turn this around and make it more meaningful. And help them see what their sacrifice of being in Afghanistan really meant. Again, remember this was right, this was about 2 years after the 9 11 attacks. And , I said, why are we here?

What are we doing in Afghanistan? And I said, the reason we’re here is that we have a choice. We can fight we can fight terrorism at home or we can fight terrorism here where it begins. And and you’re here because we would rather fight terrorism in the terrorist [00:10:00] backyard than in our own.

Because you’re here and you’re doing this work people back home are having a safe and quiet Christmas. And, and just that whole change of thought pattern and able to see a bigger picture made a big difference in these young airmen’s lives. And I could see their heads were held a little bit higher. Their shoulders were a little squarer as they walked out. And one of the senior enlisted guys, one of the chief master sergeants came to me and he said, sir, that was real leadership, that made me feel good too, because I just felt like, yeah, let’s just get our eyes off ourselves, get our eyes focused on the big picture here and how our service is making a difference for those back home.

So that was really a very meaningful, time for me.

Kelly: I love that. I know that made such a big difference. And every day we prayed for your safety. We had been stationed in Utah. You had deployed before when a terrorist bomb had [00:11:00] exploded in Khobar Towers.

Yes. And so we knew the risks. We had lost friends over the years. And we prayed every day for your safety and your leadership. I’m so grateful that God protected y’all and brought you home. Another memory I remember you visited an orphanage while you were over there too.

Lee: Yeah, again, this whole idea of. Of getting outside of ourselves and looking to the needs of others. We adopted an orphanage there in Afghanistan and. We solicited donations from people back home. And so we had lots of stuff to give and we had to be careful.

And this is the sad state of life in Afghanistan. But if we enriched, we had to be careful because if we enriched the orphans too much, then they would become a target of the locals because they would see them as having more than they did, and so we had to be careful with that. But, it was really [00:12:00] sweet and special and, and to be able to give us a pair of new shoes to a young child in Afghanistan was good.

And, it wasn’t without risk for us, we had to take security with us and put on our helmets and flak vests. It was a little silly looking around all these little kids and you’re dressed in your full up combat gear. But again, it was meaningful. People got a sense of purpose out of it. And again, I think God was glorified in all of that.

Kelly: I remember that one of the things you took away from that. You sent me a picture of those little kids and you’re right. It did. There was a stark contrast between all of you and your full up battle gear next to these little bitty kids. They were so adorable.

But I, I remember one of the ways that you were impacted by it is you said there was such a simple joy. These kids had nothing. They had nothing and yet they experienced so much joy playing with these [00:13:00] simple toys or getting a new pair of shoes or a ribbon for their hair and that it really impacted you to just to experience that joy in such a simple way and a very barren atmosphere.

Lee: Yeah.

Kelly: That’s what I felt like God did for us that Christmas because we decided not to travel. We just decided we’ll have more of a simple Christmas.

So we went sledding. The best sledding hill in the whole area was on the base just around the corner. We had a great time doing that. We had so much fun at holiday parties with the squadrons and then bringing chili and cookie exchanges with the airmen and also eating Christmas dinner with the airmen, they love to surround them with families.And so we would meet in this huge hanger and serve a Christmas dinner to them. And we just had, we really had a wonderful time.

I remember one morning [00:14:00] I took a picture of the snow. We had record snowfall that year, about 40 inches within a two week period.  I’m from Texas, okay? And we don’t do snow and I do not like the cold at all. And in Utah, when it snows, it’s the kind of thing where the grass is covered with snow until the spring, until springtime, you don’t see the grass. And so it was just feet and feet of snow surrounding our house.

It was crazy. And our neighbors, they had three teenage boys and they were so sweet and they would always shovel the snow for me while Lee was gone.  That was just a sweet gift. I remember sending you a picture of our all the snow piled high. I tried to make it look as deep as possible.

Yeah,

Lee: It was very deep. It was deep enough. In fact, that the kids were able to climb up on the roof of our house and jump off into the snow and not get hurt, except Kayla, our oldest decided when she was up there, decided to fall through our skylight [00:15:00] that was over our little carport. And fortunately, she wasn’t hurt, but I remember you telling me that you were trying to explain to the housing maintenance folks, how the snow had somehow caused the skylight to collapse. And I know you were being truthful to a point, but trying to explain how that skylight had been broken and why the kids were up on the roof, jumping off

Kelly: yeah, I’m going to have to wholeheartedly deny that I lied about that. I do remember them saying, I think you’re going to have to pay for this because I think it’s your fault. But somehow they were just merciful since you were deployed and they paid for it. But anyway, so many fun memories and it ended up being a Christmas that was just filled with joy…Which was so surprising because we weren’t together.

When Christmas did roll around when the actual Christmas day did come. We just did really simple things. We slept in. We had hot chocolate and popcorn and watched movies. And it was… the most surprising thing is that [00:16:00] we did not feel like we were missing out.

We felt like Jesus invited us in to an unexpected story filled with unexpected joy. And that’s what he did the morning when I woke up feeling weary and sad about our Christmas plans that weren’t going to work out and by an illness in our daughter that she’d still not recovered from after decades of being ill, God brought in an unexpected joy.

Lee: Let me tell 1 more quick story about that time and in Afghanistan.

I mentioned earlier that we lived in these little plywood B huts and they were segregated. I think we had about a dozen people in each B hut and everyone had their own little cubicle type space where your bed was located and you had a little dresser, but each cubicle had an opening and a lot of the folks were looking for things to cover the opening to give them a little more privacy and make the room a little darker when they were [00:17:00] sleeping during the day.

Anyway, a lot of folks would use shower curtains to cover their opening and seem like a good idea until the fire marshal came by and he objected to the idea of these shower curtains for 2 reasons. 1, we lived in these plywood huts, which were very flammable. And 2, these shower curtains would potentially give off toxic smoke … should there ever be a fire, which would potentially prevent people from getting out safely.

And so he said, we would have to get rid of the shower curtains. So we did. And apparently someone wrote home complaining about the lack of shower curtains. And, it’s like, when 1 person tells a story and 3 people down the line, the story has changed significantly.

Somehow some way, a local church. Back in, I think, Pennsylvania had heard that the commander at Bagram had forbidden people to have shower curtains. And so we received this huge order of about 100 shower curtains[00:18:00] in the mail. And of course, we had shower curtains in the showers.

That wasn’t the problem. We just couldn’t have shower curtains in the dorm area. And, and some well-meaning person back in Pennsylvania, a local church thought, oh, the humanity, these poor kids have no dignity. They can’t even have shower curtains, and that was an interesting conversation at the staff meeting about, hey, we just got an order or shipment of 100 shower curtains. We don’t need them. What are we going to do with them? But that was again, one of those unexpected Christmas surprises.

Kelly: That was one of my favorite stories that came out of that time.  I wrote a blog about that too. And I think I’ll just link to that in the show notes because it was so humorous. Anyway it was so much fun to remember these stories. Lee, thanks for being here and everyone don’t go away because I have just a little bit more to share. After Lee says goodbye.

Lee: Merry Christmas, everyone.

Kelly:  One thing I want to make so [00:19:00] clear is that even though Lee and I are sharing lighthearted stories, not for a moment did we forget that these were being shared against the backdrop of war, against the backdrop of heartache and personal loss and disappointment. And what I love about Jesus is that he enters places like that. He never shies away from what’s messy. Jesus entered our world as a baby over 2000 years ago at a time of great hardship, oppression, and disappointment and brought hope.

I know many of us are entering the Christmas season and just the same type of space. We’re aware of hardship all around the globe. We’re aware of heartache in our personal lives. We’re aware of those we love who have lost loved ones this year. And this will be our first Christmas without them. Our hearts cry out for Jesus to [00:20:00] intervene.

This is what Luke says:

That night, there were shepherds staying in the fields nearby, guarding their flocks of sheep. Suddenly an angel of the Lord appeared among them and the radiance of the Lord’s glory surrounded them. They were terrified, but the angel reassured them. Don’t be afraid. He said, I bring you good news that will bring great joy to all people.

The Savior, yes, the Messiah, the Lord, has been born today in Bethlehem, the city of David, and you will recognize him by this sign. You will find a baby wrapped snugly in strips of cloth lying in a manger. Suddenly, the angel was joined by a vast host of others. I love to imagine this, the armies of heaven.

Praising God and saying, glory to God in highest heaven and peace on earth to those with whom God is pleased.

I love that they announced the joyful coming of Jesus at a [00:21:00] time when life was broken and oppressed. I love that he came to the world through the womb of a teenage girl. I love how unexpected all of this was. Jesus, the light of the world, the lamb of God, the king of glory, the Messiah, the Christ, the Lord invites us, even in our heartaches, even in our disappointments, Jesus invites us into his joy. He is the hope of glory. He is our hope.

There’s a quote I want to share with you from prepare him room. That’s the daily advent Devotional by Susie Larson.

“The power of the Most High God rested upon this little makeshift gathering of shepherds, a baby, and his young parents. . But much of the world missed him then, just as many in the world miss him now, yet he came to us anyway. What a gift God’s given us. This Christmas story isn’t old news, it’s good news. [00:22:00] And it’s NOW news.”

My prayer is that you would take time this Christmas season if you are grieving that you would invite Jesus into your grief and that . As you lean into him, as you talk to him, that you would experience the unexpected supernatural ability to hold both sorrow and joy simultaneously in your heart.  As we look up this Christmas season, may our hearts be filled with the wonder and joy of his presence. Merry Christmas, everyone. I hope you enjoyed today as much as we did.

If you were encouraged in your faith today, it’d be great if you’d help get the word out by subscribing, sharing with a friend, or leaving a review. I’d love to hear from you. You can reach out through my website, kellyhall. org, and pick up some free resources while you’re there. Thanks for listening to the Unshakable Hope Podcast.[00:23:00]