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Like many women, Lisa Northway, 44, loves to scrapbook. But what sets this wife and mom of a teenager apart is the fact she's a U.S. army captain serving as a military chaplain.
During her most recent assignment in Kuwait—the last stop soldiers make before heading across the border into Iraq—Lisa decided to start a scrapbooking group to help women record their military experience.
"Even before I deployed, I thought if the troops involved in Operation Iraqi Freedom could express their stories in age-appropriate ways with younger family members, then they'd be better off than veterans who repress their stories and struggle with post-traumatic stress syndrome," Lisa says.
So Lisa searched for Bible studies that used scrapbooking as a communication tool and ended up at a scrapbooking website, where she was inspired by the conversations on its message board. One woman she chatted with on the site sent her supplies. Spurred on, Lisa then started a wish list and asked her friends and relatives to send her decorative papers, scissors with fancy edges, and stickers to use for her groups. Before long, she was ready to roll.
Becoming ScrappyWhen Lisa posted a sign-up sheet for the weekly Bible study-cum-scrapbooking group, she had no idea what kind of response she'd receive from the soldiers. To her surprise, both women and men attended.
"Real men scrap!" Lisa says with a laugh. "The men in my group were more competitive than the women when it came to the design and content of their scrapbooks. It made for a lively atmosphere!
"One of the men was what I call a 'Repeat Defender,'" she adds. "He was a seasoned soldier who didn't say a lot the entire evening. But he copied the entire , also called the Soldier's Psalm, in his own handwriting because he wanted his family to know which Scripture had 'held' him through all his deployments."
During her scrapbooking Bible studies, Lisa encouraged participants to cut out items as simple as the sides of milk cartons with Arabic writing on them as reminders of military life's constant transitions. She also utilized photos as part of the studies. One man, a newlywed, used his wedding pictures, explains Lisa, while a mom scrapped with pictures of her toddler back home.
One week Lisa wrote , "Set up road signs; put up guideposts. Take note of the highway, the road that you take," on the back of a photo. She talked about this succinct message that urges us to return to God, then allowed time for some quiet introspection.
"Then I turned the picture over," Lisa shares. "Some soldiers breathed in sharply. Some cried silently. It was simply a photograph of the front gate to the camp." The group members reflected on how they felt when they first arrived at the camp, and how much they'd changed since then. "Even I was surprised at how profound those moments were," Lisa says.
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