Military Wellness Collective
Military Wellness Collective is made up of four friends — two retired Marines (Joshua and Brian) turned church planters and their wives (Brittany and Kelli)— who have lived life both in uniform and on the home front. Together, we share real stories, hard-earned wisdom, and practical, biblical encouragement to help military members, and their families thrive in every season. Whether you’re navigating deployments, adjusting to life in a new town, or simply seeking hope in the middle of your military journey, our mission is to equip you with truth from God’s Word and tools for a healthy, resilient life.
Military Wellness Collective
EP-11: Loving Where You Live: Orders, Purpose, and Finding Joy in a Hard Duty Station
Hate your new duty station—or just not feeling it yet? We’ve been there: rainy arrivals, brown landscapes, unfamiliar streets, and the ache of starting from scratch. This conversation digs beneath surface-level tips to the deeper shift that actually changes a place: seeing your location through God’s sovereignty and your daily decisions to invest, even when emotions lag behind.
We walk through Jeremiah 29 to reframe exile as assignment, then track the movement in Acts to show how God advances purpose through people on the move. From Fort Sill to coastal North Carolina, we share honest stories—how “get me out of here” became “we don’t want to leave”—and the practices that carried us: asking God what He has for us here, choosing gratitude when the scenery isn’t our style, and joining the rhythms locals already love. You’ll hear practical steps you can try today: unpack the boxes, hang the photos, find one festival or trail, meet a neighbor by name, and build a support web before you need it. If your spouse deploys, we make the case for staying planted where you’re stationed so you can grow roots, receive help, and make reintegration smoother when they return.
We also get specific about why a healthy local church matters more than another stream in your podcast queue. A pastor who knows your context, a small group that shares your load, and a diverse body that reflects your city can turn “temporary housing” into a true home base. Along the way, we swap resources—from neighboring guides to simple rules of life—that help you shift from counting down days to making the days count. Press play for a clear, encouraging path to love where you live, even if you didn’t choose it.
If this resonated, follow, share with a friend who just moved, and tell us one local thing you’ll try this week. Your next step might be the beginning of home.
SHOW NOTES:
3. Holy Hygge- Amazon.com : holy hygge
4. How do I Find a Church in my Military Community? - Praetorian Project
http://instagram.com/militarywellnesscollective
All right, guys, I am Brian O'Day, and I will be our host today. I am joined by my lovely bride. We get to use adjectives on this side of the table this week. And I'm also joined by Joshua, our good friends, Joshua and Brittany Brown. And we're in eastern North Carolina. If you were curious where we are, we are well into podcasting, and this has been fun. Hopefully, it's been fun for those of you who have been listening. We're so thankful for those who have dived in with us and our regular listeners. We're so thankful. If you've got questions, if you've got thoughts, reach out to us and uh let us know what we should be talking about. You if you know us, you can just talk to us about it. But if you don't know us, Military Collective on Instagram, Military Wellness Collective. Military Wellness Collective on Instagram. And I think you can follow the thing, follow, like, share the podcasting thing. But anyway, today we are talking about loving where you live. I'm not primarily talking about the house you live in or your whatever. I'm talking about the city. We're talking about the place where God has placed you. And we're talking about this because it seems to be something that we struggle with in the military is loving the place that we live. And so let's just jump in to what God said to some exiles. And we read this passage early on, several episodes ago, but it it bears revisiting. Jeremiah chapter 29 and verse 4. Thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel, to all the exiles whom I have sent into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon. Babylon, from Jerusalem to Babylon. What a massive trip. Anyway, build houses and live in them, plant gardens and eat their produce. Take wives and have sons and daughters, take wives for your sons and give your daughters in marriage, that they may bear sons and daughters, multiply there and do not decrease, but seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its the city's behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare. If you are bitter and hating where God has placed you, you actually have an issue with God. If you embrace where God has placed you, you're actually going to grow in your relationship with God, and you're going to grow in seeing what God has for you in that place. What other biblical passages come to your mind when we're when you're thinking about this that you've had to wrestle through?
SPEAKER_02:Well, recently we've been preaching through the book of Acts, and it's been a lot of fun. It's been kind of a whirlwind. And and something that keeps coming up is showing that people are being seemingly pushed out, persecuted out, thrown into different places, sent to different regions around the Mediterranean. And through all of that, from the bird's eye view, we're able to read it and go, okay, yeah, God is sovereign and He is orchestrating this, and He's putting all these people in these places for a reason. And you get to see the reason that the gospel gets spread to this area and that area, and and they're able to commune in this space or build churches in this area or whatever the case, or reach this person that then puts a church in this other space. And so there's just all these really cool connections that start happening. And what's fun is when you read it and realize that the people that are in it doing it and they're they're living it out, they don't fully grasp the impact of everything that's happening until either after or if ever. And so when we're thinking about where we live and where we're sent to and where we have to go in the military, or or even if you're not in the military and you gotta be sent somewhere, realize that God is doing something through that. And you're you just need to figure out what God is doing in it. And you'll can you can then have a whole different perspective on that space that you're in.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, and God is, I'm glad you brought up Acts because the book of Acts is a book of movements. The gospel is going from Jerusalem to Judea to Samaria to the ends of the earth. And so it's a book of movements. And as you work through that book, you realize that the movement is often happening through persecution, through hardship. And so the gospel moves on people who move. Yeah. And so movement is the method. And so if you're a person who moves and you know the gospel and you know God, then you are the method of moving the gospel. The gospel doesn't move on people who stand still, the gospel moves on people who move. And as much as we love this text technology of getting a podcast in your ears, it's not the same as being present in the city where you are. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:That's really good. It as you were talking about movement being the method, and Joshua, you mentioned God's sovereignty over moving them. Uh, I just want to remind us all that I've had to remind myself a lot about this in military life is the military is not sovereign over your orders. God is sovereign over your orders. He has orchestrated that and given you that place to go. And I love what Brian mentioned at the beginning. If you are hating where you're living, that's an issue between you and the Lord. And it makes me think of an episode we just did a couple weeks ago on journaling. Like, journal through that.
SPEAKER_03:Work that out.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, wrestle through it, ask yourself some hard questions.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, it doesn't mean that you're gonna love like you should love it right away. I think don't be discouraged that you may start out hating it, but yeah, work through it and fight to love it and enjoy it. Yeah.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, and faith that God is doing something. Like love is an action, love is decisions to move forward towards certain things and or people. And so we're using that word intentionally, love where you live. It may not start from this like well up of emotions of like, this is the favorite place I've ever lived. Normally, our first drive into town in a new place, our initial responses are not all roses and butterflies. I wonder if anyone has a memory of rolling into a new town and not loving it. And just if you happen to live in one of these towns that we mention, we're saying that we're the problem. Our perspective was the problem, not that town. We should be fine to live just about anywhere.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. Well, I won't even mention where we went, but okay, when we first got married, our first duty station, we drove in with two cars full of stuff. Maybe it was one car full of stuff. I can't remember now. It was two cars, it was raining, so that didn't help. Different landscape in this place than what I was used to. So I to me it didn't seem beautiful and it was raining.
SPEAKER_03:But I think and we didn't know the town. So our hotel we were going to was not in the best part of town.
SPEAKER_00:And then as just you start getting settled, we joined a church pretty quick. But even that was hard because I felt like, you know, we just didn't have those relationships. I mean, anytime you move to a new place, all that stuff has to be built. It does not happen immediately. So that yeah, I think that was just hard. But one thing to do is not just think that, oh well, it's gonna be hard and I hate it and whatever, but just to keep trying to build those relationships. And one thing that has helped is to find something beautiful about that different landscape, different town, whatever outside, because God's creation is beautiful, and you can learn like I've just learned to love things that are different than what I'm used to.
SPEAKER_04:That's good.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I think I agree with you. We when we moved, we had a really hard place. I'm gonna say where it was, Sam. Yeah, it was Lawton, Oklahoma, and we were stationed there at Fort Sill for artillery training school. And when we got there, I was like, we have gotta get out of here. And it it wasn't even necessarily like the people or the place. I don't it we were not in a good place spiritually. We had just had some really hard things happen before our move. And I just remember it being so hard. And Joshua was asking his command. We thought we were only gonna be there for six months because he was in zone for promotion and lots of things happened. But I look back on that time and I pull out my journals and read them often because the Lord used Fort Sill in Lawton, Oklahoma, in a way that I could never have imagined in those first six months, to where we end up being there almost three years. It was a longer duty station for us. And I didn't want to leave. I wanted to stay there. And even when we started, yeah, started praying about church planting. I was like, let's go to Lawton. I want to go back to Oklahoma. And God didn't lead us there. But it I don't now look back at it as our desert healing place. It was a place God did miraculous things in my heart personally, in who I believed God was, is my theology, the doctrines I believe, why I believe what I believe, just so many things there.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, there was we left a very green place and we went to a very brown place. We went to a place, we went left a place with an ocean, and we went to a place with essentially large puddles that you couldn't eat the fish out of because of the mercury content. Um we went to a place that had a lot of water, or went from a place with a lot of water that and then went to a place that was very desert-like, brown, and the landscape was rocks. If you didn't water, which you couldn't water all the time year long, the the lawn would crack because it was so dry, foundation issues. It was so hot in the summertime. I remember it was a dry heat, but it was so hot. Like just the geography alone was just a very different place. So we were like, man, this is gonna be rough.
SPEAKER_03:But then, can we get to the butt then part? We yeah, so what are the things? So we've all had those experiences, and it's weird, Joshua. We haven't even talked about deployment locations. Oh man, that's a whole different situation. But then, you know, just briefly, you know, you're living in tents, you're living in weird situations. Sometimes you're moving for long durations, you're sleeping in vehicles, you're whatever, you're sleeping on the hood of vehicles, you're sleeping in fighting positions, whatever the case is. So we didn't even talk about that, but we've we've all experienced that. Oh my goodness, how long are we gonna be here? Oh my goodness. What what's what are these orders? How quickly can you get out of this? How quickly can we move? How quickly can we EAS? How quickly what how long's this deployment? Let me get that deployment countdown thing. Yeah, okay. So, what do you do when you have those feelings and thoughts, that desire to escape? What do you do to embrace the place where God has placed you?
SPEAKER_02:So there's a couple things, but I'll start with asking yourself the question okay, God, what do you have for me here? Because once you see that God has a purpose for you in that space and you start looking for that purpose and you're seeking God in that space, then you can you have a deeper purpose. So all of these other circumstances seem minuscule. They seem like they're nothing. There's something that can easily be overcome because you have a larger purpose of being there. I mean, it's kind of like I don't want to make too many examples, but like if you're going hunting and you have to like put together your pack and get your licenses and travel to a place, you there's all these circumstances that you have to do to get to a thing. But if your ultimate goal is to do something that you enjoy and to harvest an animal, and that's that is the goal, like that's the bigger goal that then strives you towards doing what you're doing. So if you find what God has for you in that space, whether it's reaching a people, growing yourself as far as spiritually, maybe it's your family growing closer together in that time. Like there's so many different aspects. If it's in a combat zone, maybe it's eternally changing somebody's life by having those deep conversations with them while you're there. There's there's so many different things that if that's the ultimate purpose, then all this other little stuff you can endure with with gladness and be fine with it.
SPEAKER_03:I love that you talk about purpose. That that really has to drive our ability to endure hardship and to embrace hardship. So purpose is a really important one. If the purpose, if if the purpose matters enough, then we will endure hardship. And if we if part of that purpose is to press into who the Lord is and making disciples of other people and doing all those things, that's gonna drive a whole lot of this. Good. Yeah, I have a practical one too.
SPEAKER_02:If no, no, I just really want to say this one. Yeah, but also if if you're struggling with like the location you're in, realize that people live there on purpose and they love it. And there's things that they love about it. Right. So when in Rome, do as the Romans do. Right.
SPEAKER_04:And so when you when you show up, I mean what the Romans are doing. There you go.
SPEAKER_03:We like knocking off convenience stores around here, like whoa, wait, what?
SPEAKER_02:But like if you're stationed in Oklahoma and they have a snake festival, cool. Go check out the snake festival. And they do, by the way. Good. If you're in if you're in Oklahoma and they have a really cool hunting and hiking area, go check it out. If you're stationed like we're at right now in eastern North Carolina and fishing is a huge thing around here, check out the local fishing scene and what they're doing. If the beaches are the thing, then go check out the beaches. Like if those aren't things that you particularly like you grew up doing, so you don't think you'll enjoy it. Like just see how these other people are finding enjoyment and join along and see what it's like. Have an open mind, basically. Be a chameleon, be like Paul as as he says, I am all things to all people.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. That's good. Something that really helped me and changed my perspective on the hard places was we were in Oklahoma City and I went to a Hobby Lobby, and as one does, and I saw scripture and I bought it, and it still hangs in our house today. And the Lord used this passage in my life in a big way. First Thessalonians 5, 16, rejoice always, pray constantly, and give thanks and everything. For this is God's will for you in Christ Jesus, and do not stifle the spirit. And as I thought about loving where I lived, I realized I have a choice. And I can sit here and wallow in the fact that I don't like this place that I want out, or I could live life on purpose and I can choose to rejoice and see the good in it. And that really set me free to love where we lived and take that principle. And like Joshua said, we just made it a habit. Even there when we got there and didn't like it, we tried to make a habit of what do the people do around here? Let's do what the people do, let's plug in because loving where you live is also seeing the gospel opportunities that are next to you. The desperate need bigger than us. Yeah, God has placed you there. And like I said before, your orders aren't from the military. Even if you're deployed, like y'all did deployments in lots of crazy places. God sent you there on purpose. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:I think another practical one that I feel like when we moved, we try to do is just I mean, this seems very whatever, but unpack and make your home and hang pictures, unpack all the boxes and be there. I think so many times we get used to this is temporary, we're only here for a while. And then we get in our head, well, it'll be better when we move here or when you get out, or what, you know, whatever's next, when we're closer to family, that's gonna be better. And I just saw how God worked. I can look back and see how I was very sad about being far away from family, but how God did such a work in our marriage because it was just us. I mean, we have great relationships with our family, so it's not like they were necessarily toxic or anything, but being away from them forced us to build our own without you know, the input or the just whatever, just to build our own rhythms, yeah. Rhythms of our family family. And but also making a home that you can love and feel at home, you know. Yes. But I would also say too, I'm a homebody, so I can tend to do that too much and not get out, but realize you gotta get out and you know, meet people, see the beautiful things, yeah, enjoy the town.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, when it comes to this like temporary nature of living in a space, don't let that also roll over into where you find a church, a place to worship. So often people are like, We're only gonna be here for a little while, so we'll just settle and go to this place, or pick a church off of some reasons that aren't the best. Uh go back a few episodes. We talked about it. Exactly. Like, don't be like, oh, we're just only gonna be here for six months or a year, so we're just gonna watch online whatever church from back wherever. So yeah, keep consistent in picking a church that's good and right that'll help you grow in whatever space you're in.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, let's circle back to the church thing here in a second and why to to choose a physical church, but so practical. I love so purpose. Why does God have me here? Open our eyes to that. We're talking about really practical things. Hey, what do the there's people here who haven't moved away and run away. How do we engage with them and find out what they do? You guys go to the shrimp festival every year near here. Like, you know, find that kind of stuff. We would, when we were in Oklahoma, we'd go see Buffalo and Longhorns and climb up the mountains and those types of things. So some of those practical things. I even love, Kelly, the practicality of like unpack the boxes. If there's part of why you don't unpack is because you're like, yeah, I really don't want to be here and I don't want to accept it. And some of that just physical doing the unpacking and hanging pictures on walls and deciding what furniture goes where and purging the things that you don't need in this house and giving those away, or whatever the case you need to do with those things, like there's just something really good about that. Are there any other practical things that we can do to engage the city we're in before we get to that, like find a local church?
SPEAKER_01:I would like to talk really quickly about if your husband is deployed, live where you're stationed. We made a habit of that from the get-go. I was 19 pregnant with our first baby, and I stayed. I'm not saying don't ever go visit family or you know, take a few weeks and spend the holidays with them. That's not what I'm saying. So please hear my heart in this. Y'all are building a life together, and the Bible talks about leaving and cleaving. And it is very, very important that you establish community where y'all live together. So I just want to that is my practical tip. One of them, I I feel really passionately about that. If you have questions about why, you can send us a message. Yeah, and I'd love to talk about that.
SPEAKER_02:In order to make that more palatable, doing some of those practical things and then getting to know the people around you, you know, creating that support network so that when your spouse does leave, you're more likely to stay instead of just running back, quote unquote, home wherever wherever you grew up. And yeah, go ahead.
SPEAKER_01:Just one more thought on that, too. Like the community you're in understands the military. They're not gonna let you wallow. They're gonna encourage you to love the Lord with all your heart, soul, and mind and to press into the hard. So that that's a reason to and and it engages the community. It it helps you love where you live when you walk through things with people that actually live there too.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, and on there, there's so many different online ways you can get plugged in, especially nowadays. Get on whatever local forums, whatever the HOA is doing, whatever's good, whatever local festivals are happening, just search it and then start showing up to them. And some of them are kind of funny and weird, and sometimes you can mess up. Like just north of here, I believe there's something called a mullet festival. Yeah. And there's people that show up there with the haircut and they're all excited about this mullet festival, and then they realize it's a fish, and they're like, Oh, I I think they know what they're doing. Yeah, they absolutely know what they're doing.
SPEAKER_00:I think one thing is just making a habit or being intentional about meeting your neighbors, just that are right next door, across the street. It can be awkward, it can be, you know, but it's just that's one way to just right outside your home, you have people that you at least know their name, and then build, try to build a relationship from there.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, that's good. Very good. All right. And so, yeah, very good, especially about staying there as your primary dwelling, even when your husband leaves for an extended period of time. Make sure your primary dwelling is there. So important, so helpful. It helps just from the guy's side. When I would come back from deployment and Kelly had kind of built this life and these relationships and these rhythms, it helped me to like dive into that instead of us like starting all over again six months later or seven months later, whatever the case was. And so it's actually helpful for that reunification process instead of like, oh, we're doing the same thing that we just did eight months ago, trying to meet our neighbors and trying to meet people and trying to do all those things. So I love that. Let's talk about the importance of a local church family in helping us live where we live. How does like this has kind of been an undertone assumption? How is a lot of this being played out and lived out in an actual local church?
SPEAKER_01:Plugging it in to that local church. Yeah. And what do they have to offer? Do they have life groups? Am I doing or community groups, whatever your church calls them? Get involved with that, build community where you live, listening to the preaching that actually applies to your context and your culture, where you're at. I know we can listen to sermons online from everybody, but they're not your pastor. They are not doing life with you. They don't know you. And I'm not saying don't do that. I there's great sermons, but your pastor's shepherding you. He knows what you're going through. He knows the hardships, he knows the trials if there's deployment, he knows if you just moved there. And so does your life group in those communities, building friendships through that local church that honestly in the military, especially in the Marine Corps life where it's small, you could see them again at another duty station, even. I don't know if that answers your question, Brian.
SPEAKER_00:But and I mean, we are brothers and sisters in Christ with our, you know, fellow Christians. So I think getting plugged in to small group, that's where we get those build those relationships that become so that's our family away from family. I mean, it is our family, you know. So I think that's been huge as we move around. I feel like now it has to be built. So that's different than like our family that we were born into. But yeah, like you said, by the time we leave, we're like, we don't want to leave because we have this family. So it's worth that effort and struggle sometimes to that.
SPEAKER_01:You saying that makes me think too, like we're living on mission together. When I plug into that local church, you talked about meeting your neighbors. If I'm involved in that local church and I have friends in that local church, our desire should be to see more people come to faith in that community and with our neighbors. So you're living on mission with the local church that God has purposefully placed you in that space.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, and the the church is a collective of people who are unified around knowing Jesus, right? So that's a very, very open thing. And so within that church, you have locals, you have military, you have people who are involved in a whole bunch of different aspects of that community. Hopefully, if that church is reaching the community, they're reaching all aspects of that community. So by joining a good local church, you actually access every aspect of that community in a microcosm of believers, of people who have a good perspective on that community and not one that is a negative one that'll pull you down into depression, anxiety, and all sorts of problems.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, so not even just the military, right? Like there's non-military people in your community that you can get to know to.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah. Yeah. So if you have recently moved into a new location, maybe in the past few months, man, just something really don't give up. It's normal. What you're doing is you just picked up your whole life and moved it to somewhere you don't know. Like if you've done that, it's normal and natural for you to like have a little internal freaking out going on. That's normal. But man, empty a box today. Keep listen to the next episode or a past episode and empty some boxes, hang some pictures on the wall, and look for a local church to go to this coming Sunday and check out, listen to some of their sermons and uh check out a local church. Any books I could read for the book readers, or maybe I listen to an audiobook or something like that that would help me in in some of these ideas.
SPEAKER_01:Well, there is a book called Love Where You Live, and it's fantastic. I highly recommend it. I don't remember the author, but I'll put it in the show notes.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah. The art of neighboring. We talk about meeting our neighbors, whether we're on the military installation and base housing or whether we're off base. The art of neighboring is really about how how to have gospel intentionality, missional intentionality in your neighborhood. So the art of neighboring. All right. We'll also drop how to find a local church in your military community in the in the notes. Brittany, were you gonna say one more book while you're also typing to remind yourself to put that link to the blog article?
SPEAKER_01:For all you women out there, there's a book called Holy Hooga.
SPEAKER_03:And it's how does one spell hooga?
SPEAKER_01:I believe y'all are criticizing me that it's H-Y-G-G-E, which does not look like hoogah, but it is a great read on just building a home and neighboring and living the gospel in your community.
SPEAKER_03:And did you say that's a Scandinavian word? It is a Scandinavian word. So here's what's crazy. I've met a Norwegian or two in my life, and Norway is a really difficult place to live. Like it's a difficult place to survive because it's just miserably cold like all the time. And yet they have really low incidence of depression because they embrace the cult. Just their you meet a Norwegian and they just are embracing the cold. So I thought that's a really good book, though. I haven't read it.
SPEAKER_01:Who get? Is a lifestyle. That's what it's promoted as. That's how they live. And so the woman who wrote Holy Hookah, she's from Minnesota, has Scandinavian descent.
SPEAKER_03:Also cold.
SPEAKER_01:Mm-hmm. And she takes those principles and is like, this is gospel centered, and this is why. So good deal.
SPEAKER_03:Thank you guys so much for hanging out with us for another episode of the Military Wellness Collective.