Peace—that was the other name for home.

KATHLEEN NORRIS, Woman’s Home Companion

When I was a kid, I was afraid of being home alone. Every creak or pop in the house, every time the heater buzzed or the wind rattled through an old window, I took it as a sign that a criminal was probably in the house looking for me. Like the rest of the millennial generation, I was coached from birth on how extraordinarily special I was. I understood that my dreams were very important, that I was smart and kind and good at basically everything. So naturally I considered myself an irresistible candidate for kidnapping.

When I was growing up, we lived in a very safe neighborhood in Colorado Springs, where everyone waved hello to each other and drove either a minivan or a Subaru Outback with a Focus on the Family bumper sticker on the back. Hatchbacks were everywhere, and JNCO jeans were considered the most violent affront to the pleasantness of our community. Truly, there was nothing to be afraid of.

Yet on the few afternoons I was home alone, I devoted my time to frantically plotting a catastrophe strategy. I decided that if I were confronted with a robber, I did not want to hide. It seemed to me that if I burrowed beneath blankets or wedged myself underneath the bed and was discovered, I would be trapped. So in choosing between fight or flight on the spectrum of overreaction, I decided that flight was my best option.

During those afternoons, I camped out next to the front door. I didn’t even sit down. I just stood ready and alert like a self-appointed sentry, looking out the window and counting the minutes until my parents got home.

Even now as an adult, when I linger near my own front door, I remember the afternoons I waited for my parents to come home. It’s funny how certain places act as bookmarks of emotion, how a song is related to a memory or a smell takes you back to a specific moment in time. The door, to me, stood as a passageway to my history with fear. And it’s the sort of history that escorts me right up to the present.

During the year that Mike was deployed, I was once startled awake from dead sleep in the middle of the night by an urgent banging on my front door. Not just staccato rapping—loud, echoing, impolite banging, like the thunderous beat of a kick drum. Someone with an enormous fist was bruising the center of my front door, and I thought the door might collapse or fold under the weight of the noise. The dog barked frantically, and I jumped out of bed, disoriented and afraid. My hands were shaking. Really, my whole body was shaking.

In that house, the front door had a rectangular window across the top of it, and from the top of the stairs one could peer through the glass pane and see who was knocking. That night I ran from my bedroom to the top of the stairs and caught a glimpse through the window of a Marine in uniform. He looked haunted. The bill of his hat trapped the light of an angled flashlight and sent it back toward his face, his skin a ghostly terrain of shadows.[10]

The time was 4:18 a.m., and I was alone.

“PMO! PMO! This is PMO! Open the door!” the Marine shouted.[11]

The police were at my door in the middle of the night. Fear rippled beneath my skin like an electrical current. The dog raced down the stairs and clawed at the door, barking manically. I followed her, grabbed her by the collar, and cracked the door open as she pedaled her front paws in the air. I didn’t even have time to get a word out before the officer said, “Ma’am. I need you to gather everyone in your household and meet me on the driveway immediately. All of your children, your pets, your spouse. Everyone. You need to do this as quickly as you can. Do you understand me?”

I nodded and swallowed hard. My heart was beating wildly, thumping in sync with the speed of sprinting steps I imagined using to run away.

The Marine turned quickly on his heel before I had time to ask a question. As I closed the door, I heard the percussive sound of pounding on my neighbors’ doors. Thick fists on heavy doors like a drum line parading down the street. What was happening?

I closed the door and put on shoes and glasses. In under a minute, I met the officer on my driveway, leashed dog in hand.

“Is this everyone in your household?” he said urgently.

“Yes. Just me and my dog,” I replied.

“This is everyone? There are no children with you in the house?”

“No. Just me. My husband is deployed, and we don’t have any kids.”

He repeated the question twice more, confused and disbelieving that a military spouse could live alone, particularly in her healthy childbearing years. On a clipboard he filled out a form with quick, urgent flicks of the hand. He didn’t explain the situation, didn’t offer a reason for why I was standing in my driveway in my pajamas, talking to a police officer at four in the morning.

Without looking me in the eye, he ordered me to cross the street and stand with other families who were now congregating. Children in footie pajamas held blankets and teddy bears; men and women standing side by side wore athletic jackets over sleeping clothes. As I approached with my dog, I overheard the conversation between evacuated neighbors.

“. . . there is a shooter . . . a gunman . . . threatening suicide . . . on the patio . . . they’re worried about stray bullets into the back of the houses . . .”

Then we heard a single gunshot muffled and far away. Everyone held their breath, wondering what it meant, until one of the neighbors—a man who didn’t exactly look like a Marine under his early morning stubble—said, “Well.” Then he sighed. “That means it’s over.”

And he was right.

Ten minutes later another officer came and casually said, “You all can go home now.” The crowd silently dispersed, but I don’t think anyone went back to sleep.

Details of the incident trickled out throughout the next day. Whispers of a domestic dispute infused with too much alcohol. The Marine had just returned from deployment, and everyone wondered if the notorious culprit of PTSD was to blame. He had wandered onto his back patio with a loaded gun. The police responded. Death arrived by his own hand.

After that night, even more so than before, I eyed the front door fearfully, especially after dark. When I peered through the door window from the top of the stairs, I half expected someone to be there, someone I didn’t know. It made me feel like a child again, sensitive to noises and sounds, creating bad omens from unmoving shadows, constantly brainstorming my reaction to imagined scenarios. I spent so much time scared, which was bothersome because it seemed that if fear had remained true to size, I should have outgrown it by now. Since I was an adult, it seemed like I should feel more powerful, more in control, especially when staying home alone.

The front door was particularly scary during the months of deployment, not just because of those childhood memories or the incident of the evacuation, but because the front door is where casualty notification officers arrive when a service member has been killed. So during deployment, when you’re feeling vulnerable and scared and lonely, the most suspicious intrusion in your world isn’t a call from an unknown phone number or a seedy-looking stranger who stops you on the street. It’s an unexpected knock on the door from trustworthy men in uniform. It’s a surprise that finds you at home.

And so it wasn’t just at nighttime that I felt a little squirrely around the door. It was when I heard whispers of casualties in the region Mike was patrolling, or when I heard nothing at all from him for days or weeks on end. Silence was the worst form of suspense. I worried about the front door when I was bored or when I was lonely, and most of all when I received an e-mail from Mike that was so charming and gushy that I thought, Oh my gosh I love him so much I might die, which was quickly followed by the accompanying thought: OH MY GOSH WHAT IF HE DIES?

Ironically, it was when I felt the strongest pangs of love that I simultaneously felt the strongest pangs of fear. And that’s when I began going a little bit crazy, tinting all warm feelings with imagined doom. In the absence of an accurate understanding of where Mike was in Afghanistan or what he was doing, I imagined my own reality for him, and it was far, far worse.

When I couldn’t sleep at night, I conjured up worst-case scenarios of wartime combat and death and graphic injury and escorted them across my consciousness, one by one. I pulverized my emotions with horrific scenarios as if I believed the trauma would create a callus, and that callus would protect me from pain if my fears were ever realized.

Sometimes I even poked around the imagined scene of a casualty notification, auditing the details. What would I do if it happened to me? Would my knees buckle? Would I cry immediately or be stunned, standing there wide-eyed and motionless? Who would I call first? My mom? My sister? Mike’s family? What would I say? Would I be wearing makeup? Maybe just getting home from work, heels still on? Dressed in business casual?

When would it happen? What would it look like? How would I feel? Is it possible to rehearse or prepare for such a moment?

I think when we’re afraid, we tend to grasp at any measure of control, even if it’s purely imagined. So that’s what I did while Mike was deployed. I grasped at mental preparedness that did nothing to combat the fear. It did the opposite. It fed the monster. Brené Brown calls this “foreboding joy,” combating feelings of joy with imagined tragedy.[12] She says this is a sort of armor we use to protect ourselves from the risk of fully living. She does not recommend it.

A couple of weeks after that evacuation, I was in a crowded living room with friends for Thanksgiving. The meal was hosted by a family I didn’t know very well, but I had tagged along with dear couple friends of ours, Caleb and Justine, who had adopted me into their holiday plans on a day I was enormously homesick.

The living room was full of folding tables with plastic tablecloths, seated families celebrating far from home, spouses caught in the center of deployment, and pilots who hollered call signs across the table when asking for more mashed potatoes. Kids ran around barefoot and screaming. Truly, it was lovely, but also only partially satisfying. On holidays I think everyone wants to be around familiar people, specifically around family, and so that meal felt like a pretend Thanksgiving, like I was just accidentally overeating on a Thursday afternoon.

Justine, Caleb, and I left the house at the same time. They walked to their car hand in hand, so happily married and geographically colocated that I surely would have internally annihilated them with envy if they weren’t such incredibly generous, likable people. Head down, I walked to my car, looking at my cell phone for the millionth time that day to see if Mike had called. He hadn’t. I hadn’t heard from him in days. Then I drove away.

I didn’t know it then, but once we said good-bye and buckled ourselves into our respective vehicles, Caleb checked his phone and realized he had missed several calls. From the passenger seat, Justine watched his cheerful demeanor change.

Caleb was the casualty notification officer for the unit—the same unit that Mike was in. And while we were eating and laughing and celebrating Thanksgiving, there had been a casualty. There was no word yet if it had occurred domestically or internationally, but Caleb was being urgently summoned to notify the family.

As I was driving home, I had no idea that Caleb was preparing for a notification. I didn’t know that the casualty was from the same job code as Mike’s or that the Marine was on an individual assignment just as Mike was. I didn’t know that, in the absence of better information, the assumption was that the casualty was in fact Mike and that Caleb was mentally preparing to notify his friend’s wife that her husband was dead.

More than that, I didn’t know that as Caleb prepared for notification, Justine pulled into my neighborhood, slow and quiet in her tiny Nissan. For hours on Thanksgiving night she waited near my house, just a few streets away, standing watch just in case an unfamiliar vehicle with two Marines and a chaplain pulled up and somberly knocked on my front door. Later, she told me that if I had to bear that news, she didn’t want me to do it alone. In a discreet act of love, she guarded my front door the whole time I wasn’t looking.

I did not have to bear the news that night.

Mike was alive and far removed from the circumstance that was being relayed to the notification officials. But after I heard about the series of these events, Mike’s life felt like a sharp mercy, and the memory of that day pierces me with sadness still, since someone else did have to bear the news, since this sort of thing happens so terribly often, and since I don’t understand why—why it wasn’t me, why it wasn’t Mike, when it so easily could have been.

But now when I revisit that memory, I think less of the danger of the moment, less of the lingering questions, and more of the watchfulness of my friend Justine. I imagine her in her car, sitting and waiting, praying for Mike and for me. I imagine the fear she absorbed for me and carried in private, all those terrible emotions she made space for in her own heart.

Justine is just an inch over five feet tall, petite in every way. Her soft voice betrays Midwestern roots with drawn-out vowel sounds and generous use of the word gosh. Gentleness and kindness are her most noticeable qualities, and yet on Thanksgiving night, this tiny woman was a valiant sentry, a brave guardian. She was a faithful friend to me.

And her watchfulness provided me a tangible picture of how the same God who calls himself a friend also calls himself a protector, both a shepherd who keeps watch and a gate that locks us into his refuge. Jesus called himself a gate and promised that anyone who goes through him would be cared for.[13] He didn’t promise that we would be spared from death or hardship or intrusion, but that we, as his sheep, would find pasture in him.[14] And just as the Israelites painted lamb’s blood above their doors when death invaded Egypt—just as Noah, his family, and the double-dating animal kingdom were declared safe once the door of the ark slammed closed—you and I are secure when cocooned in the belonging of our God.

I didn’t really know how to pray for Mike through deployment. Sometimes I hummed or thought really hard and wondered if that was the same thing. Other times I clasped my hands or stared at the sky and inserted “Lord Jesus, I just pray . . .” every four or five words, really bringing my evangelical A game to the practice of prayer. And during those times I passionately asked that Mike would be protected and spared from death, that he would come home alive and with all of his limbs and without PTSD. I prayed that our marriage would stay alive too.

Jesus compared the exercise of prayer to knocking on a door and assured his disciples that if they were consistent in their knocking, the door would swing open to them.[15] I realize now that when I’ve been afraid, both back then and even now, I tend to misunderstand the heart of this promise. In the knocking, I have assumed that maybe God is inviting me to strive, to earn, to attract his attention that would otherwise be directed somewhere else. I have misunderstood prayer as a way to control God rather than a pathway of surrender to him. So naturally I found that knocking and banging and begging for assurances of Mike’s safety didn’t really bring me any peace at all. It felt like clamoring for control, pitching to God my best-case scenarios, micromanaging his provision, and then waiting for his compliance. I suppose I prayed this way because I worried that disaster might come on account of me if I didn’t pray hard enough against it, as if a lack of spirituality might put blood on my hands or the whole world might fall to pieces if I didn’t dictate to God exactly how he should hold it together.

But do you know what happens to a sheep when she tries to take over as shepherd? She wanders off, only to discover how profoundly she requires rescue. What the sheep needs is not more bravery or smarts or jurisdiction over the pasture. She needs to trust in the capability of her shepherd. She needs to believe that he is good.

The thing about fear is that it tends to unearth what you believe about God. Because each time you go knocking in prayer, your disposition will reveal your expectation of what’s behind the door. Is it a sullen judge? A fickle benefactor? Is anyone there at all?

If you fear condemnation, then you will approach the door nervously, frantically, with a plea bargain in hand. If you believe God is absent or distant, then you might not bother knocking at all. And if you believe that God is only as good as your circumstances, then your prayers will become an itemized wish list, a queue of good gifts you’re still waiting on but feel entitled to.

However, if you actually believe that God is both real and good, that you are completely forgiven, adopted, and loved—well, then you might knock on the door with the confidence that peace lives inside. You might see the door as a passageway that invites you in. And you might pray not just to ask for something, but to be with someone, because his presence meets the ultimate need you didn’t even know how to ask for.

Of course, as Mike’s mom, Katie, once told me, peace is its own kind of warfare. She said this to me over the phone after I confessed to her that I thought the deployment would be different, that I thought I would be different in the midst of it. I thought that since I knew Jesus, I would arrive at serenity faster, that I would inherently have more optimism instead of this abiding brittleness. I thought that trusting God would be so much easier, that faith would cushion this experience with pleasant feelings. What was shocking to me was how much energy it took to marshal my own mind, to redirect it away from imagined doom and toward hopeful trust. I wasn’t even trying to arrive at full-blown optimism, necessarily, although that would have been nice. I was simply trying to function, to get on with it, and the act of putting one foot in front of the other was far more work intensive than I expected it to be.

Most mornings I woke up and opened my Bible, reading verse after verse about God as refuge, strength, and shield, as the consummate force that drives out fear. And I wrote these verses down in my journal as if trying to etch them into my heart, as if each one were a discovered gemstone that I held up to God and asked, “Is this valuable to me?”

Peace, at least for me, wasn’t a tidy epiphany. It wasn’t a one-moment conversion or a before-and-after transformation. It was a pursuit, a struggle, a war. It still is—this recurring choice to be ruled either by imagination or by what is true. That’s what makes the pursuit of peace so tedious at times, when the only way to embrace it is to sort it through thought by thought, verse by verse, day by day; to take each thought captive and hold it up to the light.[16]

It seems to me that peace apart from deep conviction is a sort of delusion—a mind trick you play on yourself or a form of subtle denial. To survive deployment, I figured I could either delude myself into thinking the worst wouldn’t happen or anchor myself to the belief that God would be a good shepherd to me even if it did.

Honestly? I clung to a little of both.

It was when I was home alone as a kid that I memorized a verse that has stuck with me into adulthood. Proverbs 3:25-26 (NIV) says, “Have no fear of sudden disaster or of the ruin that overtakes the wicked, for the LORD will be at your side and will keep your foot from being snared.” I remember speaking this under my breath while standing at the door with heart racing. I remember shouting it into an empty, echoing house while I ran to the kitchen to get a pencil for my homework. Over and over again I recited it, as if I were speaking to the devil himself, intimidating him with a bigger weapon, a sword of truth.[17] Still, I don’t remember exactly when I stopped being afraid to stay home alone, if the fear ebbed because I deliberately combated it with truth or if it simply faded as I grew up.

Even now, I’m not sure that fear is something we overcome altogether or if it’s just an enemy we learn to battle more effectively. But I suspect that surviving times of heart-racing uncertainty involves some interplay between spirituality and practicality. You pray for God to increase your faith, knocking and knocking on the door, and then you choose to live as if he already has. You wake up in the morning, turn the blinds to let the light in, and walk out the front door.