"Feels like home." This doesn't happen right away. We move to a new city, a new apartment, or just remodel the kitchen, and it takes a while to warm-up to it, so that it feels like home.
But honestly, there's always something. We have to make it more like HOME. Put in some last minute furnishings, change the color scheme, or complete the household - but it is never quite HOME, completely.
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As Chad Regelin got off the phone with his family, he and his team split into squads to do a routine patrol around the base in Afghanistan. Boom! A bomb had gone off and close to base.
As he dashed out the door, he couldn't wait to go home. The work was tough and demanding, but only one month to go. A mere week before the replacement team arrived.
He and some of his teammates quickly and warily made it over to the site. They began looking through the debris, trying to find anything that would be useful in identifying a maker.
Then a second time - boom! It was another bomb in the same place.
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“My heart is absolutely breaking at this time!! I wish someone could tell me it is not true!!! I don't think I will ever get the picture out of my mind of the four men standing at the door to give me the news. I just want him to come home and let me hug him. I honestly do not know how I am going to get through this!!” Shirene Regelin, Chad's mother, posted on Facebook at 8:18 a.m. Tuesday, Jan. 3.
A few hours after the second bomb, Chad had gone to his eternal home. Another life cut short, and it seems I like to feature deaths on this blog recently. But life, I find, though not easy to understand, is often only fully realized in the light of death as a transition to the eternal life, eternal home.
Chad graduated high school in 2005 and enlisted in the Navy a year later. In high school, he founded the Surf Club and was the Outstanding Senior for the varsity football squad.
Chad Regelin was the 2011 Sailor of the Year for his service as a Explosive Ordnance Disposal technician with Mobile Unit Three in southern Afghanistan. He saved innumerable lives, personally destroyed 24 bombs, training 13 others, and participating in 20 firefights.
A life lived to the full. "I have fought the good fight to the end; I have run the race to the finish!" (II Ti 4:7)
Information taken from the following article: http://www.andersonvalleypost.com/news/2012/jan/03/hometown-hero-killed-roadside-bomb-monday-while-se/.
