The Little Way of Ruthie Leming: A Southern Girl, a Small Town, and the Secret of a Good Life by Rod Dreher

we were each given a chocolate ice cream cone, Ruthie would say thank you and eat it happily. I would say thank you, then lose myself in contemplating the ontology of ice cream, the geometric properties of the cone, the relative merits of chocolate versus other potential flavors, and, if it hadn’t melted by then, I would eat it happily, then spend twice as long contemplating having done so. As with Häagen-Dazs, so with Almighty God.
    Despite these very different approaches to faith, we had independently developed interests in the patterns that God uses when He communicates to us. We both believed strongly in meaningful coincidences, which the psychiatrist Carl Jung called “synchronicities.” Ruthie called them “seven-oh-nines,” after a remarkable set of coincidences that happened to her after Mike went off to war, an event that tested Ruthie’s faith.
    After the war in Iraq started in 2003 all Louisiana National Guard soldiers and their families prepared for the day when they would get the call to deploy. It worried Ruthie and Mike for years. Mike was in the 769th Engineering Battalion. If they received orders, it would not be for combat duty, but rather construction and logistics. Still they would work in a combat zone. Mike was concerned about having to leave his family to spend a year in such a place, but he loved his Guard work, and advanced to the rank of warrant officer.
    In 2007 Mike was installing a gate for someone in Zachary when one of his sergeants buzzed his mobile phone to give him the official word: the 769th was headed to Iraq in September.
    Mike waited till he made it home that day to tell Ruthie, but she knew it was coming. It was hard breaking it to the girls that their father was going to war for four hundred days, especially because Hannahwould be starting high school and was more aware of the kinds of things that can happen to soldiers in a combat zone.
    As his battalion’s movement officer Mike had to track the unit’s equipment from Baton Rouge to Camp Victory in Baghdad. He left for training in April. When he returned home, he and Ruthie made plans for paying the bills and taking care of household responsibilities. John Bickham and other Starhill neighbors joined Big Show and Mike’s firefighter buddies in promising him he wouldn’t have to worry about his family while he was in Iraq. They had his back.
    As the date of Mike’s departure approached, John Bickham worked harder around Paw’s place to stay on top of chores, trying to give Mike more free time to spend with Ruthie and the kids. “Any hour he could get before he left, that’s what we tried to give him,” John says.
    Mike’s friends and neighbors, including David Morgan and his band, honored him with a farewell community dance called the Starhill Stomp before he left. Then the dreaded day finally came. After a prayer service the Louisiana soldiers told their loved ones good-bye at the Baton Rouge airport, and boarded their transport plane for Baghdad.
    Communication between Starhill and Camp Victory was spotty. Mike and Ruthie e-mailed or spoke by phone once or twice each week, and Skyped later in his deployment, when the service became available on base. He didn’t have much time to talk anyway. His job was maintaining construction equipment for a company of soldiers. The sand and blistering heat of Iraq, to say nothing of the IEDs (which killed one of Mike’s battalion members), made for an exhausting deployment.
    Ruthie began training for the Reindeer Run, a 5K foot race held during the Christmas season. Though she had never been a runner, Ruthie wanted to lose weight before Mike came home. Jennifer Bickham, another running rookie, joined her, as did Abby.
    “We were training three days a week for that. Ruthie and I didn’trun very fast, but we ran. Ruthie didn’t have any quit in her, but I wasn’t like that,” Jennifer says.
    “In the race, we get on the last stretch, and it’s about four blocks long. It’s