Welcome to The Lantern!

Welcome to The Lantern! Whether you stumbled onto this site by accident or you were handed one of our invitations somewhere around Clarksville, we are so glad you are here!

Please take some time to look around the site. You may want to start with our frequently asked questions page to learn more about us and why we're here. If you still have more questions, feel free to ask at any time in the comment section!

We hope to be constantly updating our resources page. If you know of any great resources for a military wife, please share! Don't forget to find us on facebook too!

Before you go any further though, please take some time to read our story of how The Lantern got started!

Our Story:

Our story is similar to that of most military wives. We are a group of women made up of mothers, professionals, students, exercise-aholics, scrap-bookers, and divorcees from all over the country and all faith backgrounds, who are married to the military, er, men in the military. We have learned, often through painful trial and error, that we cannot continue to burden the challenges that come with a military lifestyle alone. We have learned that when we rely on our own strengths, experiences, and plans to get through deployment and reintegration periods (often many periods), we fall short and our marriages, children, careers, and mental sanity suffer. It is only when we give our lives back to the One who made them that we are able, through His strength, love, and incredible grace, to live full lives despite our current circumstances. Okay, so you are probably still asking ... how did The Lantern really get started?

In the spring of 2009 an Army officer and military wife, Mya Parker, decided to get out of the military upon the completion of her obligation in order to serve military families in some capacity. Throughout her short career, Mya saw the effects multiple deployments were having on military families, including her own, and she wanted to help equip them to better handle the high operational tempo of today's militaries. Being someone who had deployed, Mya knew that Soldiers had instant community within the ranks as well as vast resources available to them in order to cope with deployment challenges ... but what about the women in their lives? Mya had the opportunity to serve as a battalion rear detachment commander for the last four months her battalion was deployed and the two months of reintegration. During this time, she worked with many hurting families, many of whom were trying to deal with the immense challenges of deployments and reintegrations alone. Of course, Militaries provide opportunities to get connected with other wives in their husbands' units, but what if, for whatever reason, women don't want to tap into those groups? What then?

In the middle of April 2009, Mya approached her pastors at Grace Community Church in Clarksville, Tennessee, about the possibility of starting a military wives ministry in the community. Her pastors gave her great encouragement and advice, including starting the ministry with a weekly community group at Grace. In September 2009, the first military wives community group started at Grace with approximately 15 women. These women were from all different backgrounds but they quickly united in the similarities that they wanted to 1) create friendships with women who understood what they were going through, and 2) learn more about Jesus. In November 2009, a group of women, most of whom were from the military wives community group, started meeting to discuss starting a monthly, open-invite gathering of military wives. Over the next several months, the group continued to pray over and plan the military wives ministry that would become The Lantern.

We look forward to seeing The Lantern grow as we reach out to military wives and our community. We hope that you will join us and let us know how we can help, if you need it. Please, come and fellowship with us!