Honoring Chris

15 April
We held a brief "Remembrance Ceremony" yesterday for our Fallen Hero, Chris Coffland. If you have been following my blog you may remember he was killed by an IED explosion last November 13th. But recently his sister painted a wonderful painting of him laughing -- which is how she remembers him -- and sent it to our battalion HQ. We had it framed and our Commander wanted to have a nice ceremony to unveil it and then hang it in our tactical operations center (TOC). It was really nice. All I had to do was lead an opening and closing prayer, which was not too bad. This morning, coincidentally, was a 5K Remembrance Run held by the EOD (explosive ordinance disposal) guys for all the soldiers KIA over the past year. If you saw the movie "The Hurt Locker" then you saw the EOD guys in action. There were probably hundreds of people who came out at 6:00 am to run. One of our Soldiers asked his wife to have this picture made up on T-shirts a few weeks ago, and so about twenty of us wore a t-shirt with Chris's painting on it. Apparently, he was fond of saying, "I'm Outta Here!" and so that is the saying on the plaque and the shirts.

I have become a big fan of Christian singer and songwriter, Mark Schultz. I got to see him in concert with "Point of Grace" when I was home on Leave. He puts on a great show, and has more energy that I ever imagined. His album, Broken and Beautiful has a song called "40 days" which really hits home for me right now. He sings, "Lord I came to the mountain top, to be with you / I felt your grace falling down like rain and I was made new / But there are time like now, when I'm all dried out / And as I've 40 days out in the desert feeling like I'm lost forever, crying out for you / But in these 40 days I'm gonna seek you, with my heart 'cause I believe you ...brought me to this place...these 40 days." I love that. Awesome lyrics!