What Does A Chaplain Do When Soul Is Crushed?

UPDATE
My answer came the following day If anyone tells you that prayers are no longer answered, share this with them.

Wounded Times
Kathie Costos
October 5, 2015

I became a Chaplain 7 years ago because I knew how faith got me through a lifetime filled with traumatic event after many others and I knew what kind of pain that causes a soul. The unspeakable grief surviving leaves behind never really goes away but we adjust and change, mostly for the better depending on how we see all of it and that was my mission.

To get the grieving to look at all of it through different views because there is always more going on around us than we remember. Pure, unclouded by ego and pride, we can see ourselves the way that God sees us, undiluted by what we hear others say and lousy advice, we can experience the miraculous healing as survivors beyond our own ability.

I paid a high price for all that knowledge and wanted to pass it on freely to spare others going through the same thing. It is from that suffering that I was able to understand what combat did to my husband and from him, what it did to the veterans I worked with over the years. My own pain helped me help families. My research helped me explain to mental health professionals what it looked like beyond the clinical books most of us had to read before the internet brought us instant answers to everything we wanted to know.

I am standing on ice with bare feet and stuck. I've been stuck for so long now that it is hard for me to know how to get out of this hearing the ice crack under my feet. There are few standing by me, ready to help when I need it but for the most part, there has been a crowd of folks using what I have to give and never thinking twice about who gave it to them.

Lately I've been seeing more and more of what I started being forgotten as more and more groups claim they invented all of it. Too bad for them that folks can look it all up discovering there were others out there I learned from since I've only been doing this a little over 3 decades by they started 4 and 5 decades ago. I just had more staying power but I was not the first. I was only one of the first to put the information up in the form of videos.

I had these videos up on YouTube before. I posted this in 2009 Give healing PTSD as a Christmas Gift this year. The videos had to be pulled because back then the music was being blocked since I didn't have the same kind of account I have now but this gives you some idea of the kind of attention these videos had.

When War Comes Home PTSD
views 2418

Veterans and PTSD version 1
All time views:14,283

Wounded Minds Veterans and PTSD version 2
1567

Wounded Minds PTSD and Veterans version 3
7777
Here is part of it,
PTSD After Trauma on Google
1709

End The Silence of PTSD on Youtube
Views: 2,919

Hero After War Combat Vets and PTSD on Google
Google 3697
Views: 1,772 on Youtube

Coming Out of The Dark of PTSD on Google
889

Coming Out Of The Dark-PTSD and Veterans on Youtube
Views: 4,304

Death Because They Served PTSD Suicides
1442

I put up up a couple of videos so you could see what was done 9 years ago. The part that gets me is that Wounded Minds was used by someone in the Navy showing it to Sailors coming back from Iraq because there was nothing else "out there" like it. Well, there is a book titled "Wounded Minds" 01 July 2013 and a charity Operation Wounded Minds with email going to Woundedminds.org.

Coming Out of The Dark is also another issue since there is a walk that is taking in thousands called 'Out of the Darkness'walkers raise awareness for suicide prevention.

If you thought your support or donations or even your prayers were given to me, they were not. I haven't had a single donation in over a year and frankly, it makes it even harder to do my ministry day in and day out knowing that while I was ahead of all these new groups, they have the support I used to have.

Sometimes I wonder why I didn't just give up back in 1999 when our battle with the VA was over and my husband's claim was approved. Then I remember the simple fact that if it all happened to us, it was happening to more veteran families as well. I wanted to make life a little easier and prayed to make a difference enough so that things would change but nothing has changed.

Too many families suffering after all these years of instant experts gathered followings into the abyss without anyone watching where they were going.

So why aren't more healing instead of suffering in the soul crushing silence? It isn't that they are willing to be silent. It is just that no one hears them anymore. No one can hear their cries for help and when they do gather up the courage to cling to that last glimmer of hope to reach out, they discover the place they turn to has nothing to give them at the same time they ask for a check for their time. Ya, nice little gimmick they have going.

I refused to play that game a long time ago and to this day, I refuse to play nice so that someone decides I am worthy of their abysmal approval. No thanks! If I valued their opinion, I would join their group but since they have proven the warning true, their deeds speak much louder than their words of being all about "raising awareness" while it turns out to be nothing more than code for raising their cash flow.

So, with all that said, I am asking for your prayers tonight. I cannot see the light anymore after 33 years. I cannot find a reason to even try anymore. I've searched my soul for so long now that I can't even remember what it looks like. I don't know how to do anything else since I have tried everything leaving me with very little support but a huge line of people looking for what I can do for them. I can't compete with all the crap out there about raising awareness when they clearly are not aware of what is real vs what is false.

So what does a Chaplain do when her soul is crushed? She asks for prayers.

I cannot keep going on like this, so please just pray that God grant me whatever I need to do whatever it is I am supposed to do.