One of the challenging aspects of being the family of a chaplain is that things are often *expected* of us. We do our best to annihilate any such expectations as quickly as possible. It’s really better for everyone that way, however humiliating it might be for me. For example, on Sunday morning, we attended the little chapel where Matt will be preaching each week. Our first mistake was probably attending church less than 48 hours after our international flights. Our second mistake was sitting in the second row. Things mostly went downhill from there, as the power (and air conditioning) went out a few minutes before the start of the service. The current command chaplain and his wife are a beautiful older couple who were so gracious toward us in every way. It was his last Sunday preaching, and the little chapel had about twenty people present (including us and we had the only children in the service).

After the power went out, they started the service. There were a few announcements (including a call for praise team members; Memphis promptly leaned over and announced she was going to audition), introductions, and prayers.

As the chaplain began praying before he preached, he called out in a booming voice,

“JESUS! *long dramatic pause* JESUS *long dramatic pause* Je-“

He was interrupted by a snort chuckle by Memphis that might have passed as a sneeze if she had not done it twice, followed by Jet imitating her. I clamped my hand down on Mem’s knee and glared at Jet who loudly said, “What?”

By the time the chaplain finished praying, Cora Jo had to go to the bathroom and I needed to crawl under a rock. I prayed for the power to come back on, so that at least the fans and air conditioning might muffle a bit of our noise. It did not.

We survived the rest of the service by unwrapping lifesavers one crunchy wrapper at a time to keep Jet from crawling under the seats and shooting imaginary spiderman webs, complete with “Ch…shoooo” sound toward the preaching chaplain.

At the end of the service, the chaplain called us to the stage and prayed over us, while Ransom and Memphis hung on Matt’s arms and Jet tried to scale up his back. Cora Jo and I stood to one side and pretended that we were dignified. THEN the power came back on.

After the service there was a fellowship lunch. No one ran from us in fear. I met a couple who graduated from ASU (Go Sun Devils!) and we chatted for quite some time about the Phoenix area. Another woman was leaving (PCSing) for Virginia, and we exchanged info about Virginia and Okinawa. If any Futemna Chapel folks are reading this, I apologize for our antics. We are a real family with real personalities (maybe a little heavy in this area). We love Jesus AND make mistakes. We’ll see if this little chapel survives us.

*By the way, after the service, I interrogated the snorter and found out that she was not laughing at the chaplain, but at a picture her brother had pulled up on the ipad of a bunny eating a wolf. I have no idea why this is funny, but the ipad (and said wolf-eating bunnies) will no longer be a part of the worship experience offered at the chapel.*