Interview with Jocelyn Green by Carrie Fancett Pagels

Jocelyn Green

Jocelyn Green is the author of Wedded to War and of four nonfiction books, including Faith Deployed: Daily Encouragement for Military Wives, and Stories of Faith and Courage from the Home Front.

Jocelyn, welcome to Overcoming With God.  We appreciate your willingness to share your testimony of overcoming with our readers. 

Would you tell us about the most difficult thing in your life you have had to overcome, with God’s help?

In a nutshell: depression, and the fear of depression.

Now, if you want the story: Once upon a time, I was twenty-two, in love with a man who didn’t love me back, and determined to prove to him, and to myself, that I could live without him very well, thank you very much. So I hastily took a job as a private English tutor in Vienna, Austria. Yep, I moved to the other side of the world, and nope, I didn’t know German. I did not go through an organization when I accepted the position, so when the boundaries and expectations kept shifting, I had no recourse or protection against what the Viennese family I lived with was asking me to do. 

I had unwittingly placed myself in the care of a woman who was 

extremely manipulative, and her promise to let me take German classes was completely reneged. Not knowing the language made me illiterate, dumb, mute, and more isolated than I could have imagined possible. As many of you probably know, isolation breeds depression, and that’s exactly what happened to me. I remember vividly the moment when I snapped—my knuckles white on the staircase railing—and I just started crying and couldn’t stop. For days. For weeks. Until a neighbor, who happened to be a missionary from Minnesota, told me that I needed to take care of myself and go home. I want to make it clear that I was reading the Bible and praying throughout this time. I did not feel that God had abandoned me, and I still trusted him. It was not a matter of will-power, or of just “being more spiritual” to turn off my tears. My system was just overwhelmed and shutting down. My hair was turning grey. I lost weight until my clothes hung on my shoulders as if from a hanger.

So I went home, in defeat, after never really failing at anything in my life before. Back in America, I was diagnosed with severe depression, and put on medication. I moved to Washington, DC, got a great job as an editor for a nonprofit on Capitol Hill, and found a church. Four months later, I decided to stop taking my medication cold-turkey, because I no longer lived in isolation, and the triggers for my depression no longer existed. Then I worried about my decision, and consulted a Christian psychiatrist, to basically confess what I did. He didn’t tell me I had been wrong to just stop taking the medicine, but he did say to watch myself, because people who go off their medication before they’d been on it for six months are more susceptible to slip into depression again.

Fast forward two years. On July 5, 2003, I married my husband, an officer in the Coast Guard. Two days later, we moved from Washington, DC, to a small town called Homer, Alaska. On our one-month anniversary, he kissed me goodbye, and left for a month. I was alone, with a house, but without our furniture which had yet to arrive. It was me and the walls. “But,” I told myself, “at least I know the language here!”

It was a shock on many levels. I went from having a career to being unemployed. From big city to small town. From single to married, and from civilian to military. Rob was gone seven months of our first year of marriage, though not all at once. It was challenging. My worst month was November. The weather was cold, it was dark, and when our driveway was covered in ice, I was all but stranded at home. I had to put chains on my boots to walk to the grocery store. I really had a mental battle going on. I was terrified I would slip back into depression. I had to tell myself it was just one day, just one bad day. Everyone gets them. It doesn’t mean you fall into a tailspin. It’s OK to have a bad day, or two, or three.

I felt like I could have gone either way that year. Even if I hadn’t gone into a clinical depression, I could have become bitter and resentful about the sacrifices I made to tag along with Rob’s career. But, with God’s help, I made a decision. I would not allow myself to isolate. I joined two book clubs, two Bible studies, volunteered at the nursing home, and drove a cancer patient to her medical appointments in Anchorage, five hours north of us. God taught me things through his Word, in light of my new status as a military wife that left me in awe of Him.

God used that year to breed in me a passion for supporting the spiritual lives of other military wives. A few years later, my first book was born: Faith Deployed: Daily Encouragement for Military Wives. Fourteen other military wives from all branches of service helped me write that devotional book—and in 2011, a sequel was released: Faith Deployed . . . .Again.

What is your favorite bible verse and why?

Isaiah 26:3: “You will keep in perfect peace him whose mind is steadfast, because he trusts in you.” This verse speaks so well to my struggle in Alaska. I had to keep my mind steadfast on God, not on my circumstances, and in return, he kept me in perfect peace. I love sharing this with other military wives, but it is relevant to each one of us.

Wedded to War

Disability friendliness: Is this latest release available in audio format or do you have any other works available on audio?  Do your e-books have audio capability? Do you have any in large print? 

Wedded to War, along with all my nonfiction books, are available for ereaders, which can enlarge the size of the print on the screen. But so far, no large-print hard copy books or audio books are available.

What has been the most important thing you hope your readers will get from your books and why?

From my nonfiction books, it would be the concept of Isaiah 26:3. From my novel Wedded to War, I want readers to glean a few different insights. First, that we should be more concerned with what God thinks than with what society thinks. The privileged women who gave up their lives of ease in order to nurse faced ridicule and open hostility, but many of them believed God called them to the work. So I hope readers will really examine what they feel God is calling them to do, and then do it with confidence.

Second, from the character of Ruby, I hope readers will learn that even if we make mistakes in our lives, or if we harbor guilt or shame, that does not need to direct the rest of our lives. We’re all sinners, aren’t we? We make mistakes. We do wrong. Satan wants us to believe we are irreparably damaged by those sins, and that those sins absolutely define us. But here’s where we take that thought captive and obedient to Christ—what does God say about our sin? 1 John 1:9 says: “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness.” So there you have it. We need to choose to believe God’s opinion of us rather than anyone else’s. And we can learn God’s perspective only from being rooted in the Bible and by prayer.

As you researched your books, did you learn anything that particularly touched your heart?

Oh, gobs of things.

My research for both nonfiction and fiction brings me to tears at some point or another. I will just share with you the most recent story that tugged on my heartstrings. 

A young soldier in the Civil War had to have both his legs amputated. His nurse wrote a letter to his sweetheart to let her know he survived the operations, and this girl wrote the soldier a Dear John letter. The soldier read it, said to his nurse, “Tell her I forgive her,” and then died.

In this latest work, do you have any topics useful for bibliotherapy, or therapeutic influence through reading about a disorder or situation?

Yes! Topics in Wedded to War would be: misplaced sources of identity, dealing with one’s past, guilt, shame, prejudice, discrimination, loss of a parent, sibling relationships, parental disapproval, and reconciling a loving God with the realities of war.

Thank you Jocelyn for agreeing to answer these questions.  Have a blessed day and keep on writing!!

BIO:

Jocelyn Green is an award-winning author and freelance writer. A former military wife, she authored, along with contributing writers, Faith Deployed: Daily Encouragement for Military Wives and Faith Deployed . . . Again: More Daily Encouragement for Military Wives. Jocelyn also co-authored Stories of Faith and Courage from the War in Iraq & Afghanistan, which won the Gold Medal from the Military Writers Society of America in 2010, and Stories of Faith and Courage from the Home Front, which inspired her first novel: Wedded to War. Her next novel, Widow of Gettysburg, releases in May.

Find her at:

www.jocelyngreen.com
www.heroinesbehindthelines.com
www.faithdeployed.com
www.facebook.com/jocelyngreenauthor

Purchase her books:

Wedded to War http://amzn.to/VFVPbN
Widow of Gettysburg http://amzn.to/UZiv4z
Stories of Faith and Courage from the Home Front http://amzn.to/ULe37N
Faith Deployed: Daily Encouragement for Military Wives http://amzn.to/TVG0fZ
Faith Deployed . . . Again: More Daily Encouragement for Military Wives http://amzn.to/W3SDTP
Stories of Faith and Courage from the War in Iraq & Afghanistan http://amzn.to/13vN4DH

Giveaway:  Carrie has a copy of Wedded to War to give away and Jocelyn is offering a copy of her new release, Widow of Gettysburg!  
Answer this question and leave your email to enter: What is your favorite Civil War-era story and why?