OUR PORTION: An Answered Prayer

Today I got to pin my husband!!!

For those of you who might be unfamiliar with the ARMY ways...my husband got a promotion today! I'm so proud of all the effort he has put in toward this promotion! It has been long deserved (in my opinion)! He's been at a different post on a detail, but they let him come home for a half a day for the little ceremony.

It is an answered prayer for us! One that was highly unexpected.

Just a little back story and explanation for those who are unfamiliar with how it works. As an enlisted soldier Tim is required to go before a board for review and obtain a certain amount of points, which vary month to month, in order to receive a promotion. You can get points by taking college classes, Military Correspondent Courses (a type of online class geared toward Military knowledge), and other Military Training. Three years ago Tim passed the board's review and became eligible for the promotion. All he had to do was have enough points.

Tim missed this promotion by 1 point, two months in a row. 1 POINT!!! It was complete torture and has been haunting us since.

Shortly after that time, Tim changed his MOS (his job within the ARMY), and the required number of points was even higher. Then, a little over a year ago, the ARMY re-did the point system. The system runs on a 800 point scale. Prior to the "re-do" Tim had around 630 points. After the "re-do", his points dropped down to 300 something. A promotion seemed WAY out of reach.

For the last year Tim has been working very diligently to get his points back up. He has taken hours worth of the Correspondent Courses and we also paid a small amount to have all of the extra training/classes he has received transferred into college credit. (Completely worth it!) About two months ago Tim became maxed out in both of these areas, but he still didn't have the points needed to make the promotion list. We have watched the points for the last 3 years and they typically drop during the summer and spike up again in the winter. The only option left to receive more points was for Tim to go to another school.

He actually had a slot to go to a school he needs back in March, but it was cancelled last winter when we received his orders to come here to Germany. He's been fighting for the last three months to get another slot for the class. That in itself is a whole other story. For the last few months we have been praying hard for him to get a slot for the class right after the New Year, that way when the points dropped down again he'd be good to go.

Long story, semi-short (since you've already got the long version)....Last week the points dropped to 601. Tim currently has 605 points, putting him on the promotion list! We weren't expecting it and Tim wasn't even checking the list. We actually heard word of it from some of his buddies down range. We didn't share the news at first because it seemed too good to be true. Tim wanted to do some double checking and make sure his orders actually came in.

All that to say, God is good! He answered a prayer for us in a way we didn't expect and at a time we least expected it. In our minds it is by God's divine hand alone that the points dropped to where they did, when they did.