Stoicism is to a military wife what courage is to the man she loves.

I am not certain of the attribution, but I believe it was General George C. Marshall's wife who said that being married to a soldier in the field is like being sick. It's the first thing that comes to mind when waking up in the morning and the last troubling thought that finally gives over to sleep at night, and in between, it lurks like a cancer, always in the background as the day plods onward.

I have known three women whose husbands have died in battle. Each has told me that the news of their loved one's death has come with a strange species of relief. It brings with it an end the guarded caution when opening the morning newspaper, the startled jump when the phone rings, the momentary panic at the sound of a car approaching on the street, the whispered prayers: Please, God, don't let them turn into my driveway. It brings an end to what C.S. Lewis called "the long dark night of the soul."

Military wives must be accomplished liars, but theirs are pardonable sins. They have no choice but to wear false smiles so the children won't worry. They have no choice, when asked how they're doing, to answer with a simple "Fine." They have no choice but to hide their terror behind masks of confidence, because if they let one terrified tear fall, the floodgates won't hold.

There is a sorority of solidarity among them. They cloister themselves behind closed doors to share their grief, knowing that God gave us burdens, but that he also gave us shoulders to help others bear them. Their support group is private, though; when an outsider enters, they paint the smiles back on their faces and resume the quiet waiting game. And the moment the knock on the door comes to one of their own, they spring into action to fend off the attack, painfully aware that it is only by the grace of God that their own loved ones have survived, but that the knock could come for them at any moment.

Every now and then, though, the façade wears thin enough that a crack shows through the veneer, but even then, they do their level best to minimize their worry. Denial is their way of life. It's the only way they can survive.

There is one who could use a boost right now. Go see Jennie and lend her a little moral support.

And Jennie, know that you're in my prayers. Your beloved is a tough guy, but I hope it gives you comfort knowing that he's fighting alongside the toughest guy of all time.

On Wednesday, something remarkable happened. There was a tiny flash in the sky that signaled the universe coughing up one of its secrets, and we were there to see it.

In the wee hours of the morning, a gamma ray burst was detected in the constellation Bootes. It turned out to be more massive than any ever seen previously and shattered the record for the farthest object visible from Earth. Estimates put the burst at somewhere around 7.6 billion light-years away (the previous record was a mere 2.6 million light-years), meaning that the star exploded when the universe was less than half its current age and long before the Earth was formed. Equally impressive is the fact that this explosion was so massive that, for just a brief period, it was so bright that it could have been viewed with the naked eye.

The burst was the astronomical birth announcement for a newborn black hole, one of the universe's more curious phenomena, so named because the gravitational field it creates is so strong that even light cannot escape it. The physics involved with the concept of a black hole are so bafflingly complex that one astrophysicist has quipped that black holes are places where God divided by zero. Not a bad description, really.

We live in a great place - halfway between the realm of the massive and the realm of the miniscule. We can look into telescopes and see huge stars halfway across the universe, then peer into electron microscopes and see the tiny atomic building blocks from which they're constructed. We're right smack in the middle of infinity and nothingness. It's the best seat in the entire universe.

The problem is that we've started taking it for granted. Great things are there for the viewing, but we're so distracted by our tiny little lives that we rarely take the time to stop and look.

And we miss a lot.

The Old Testament tells a story about Moses, who was taking a flock of sheep for a stroll one day on the outskirts of the desert and noticed a burning bush. As he watched, he realized that the shrubbery, though ablaze, wasn't being consumed by the fire. Curious, he took a few steps closer and was stunned when he heard the voice of God say to him, "Take off your sandals, Mo. You're walking on holy ground."

Though I'd heard that tale from early childhood, it was only a couple of years ago that it occurred to me that Moses had probably been walking that same path for years, completely oblivious to the fact that the ground upon which he trod was hallowed.

It was this realization that led me to a startling question: How many burning bushes have I walked past because I was too preoccupied to notice?

As it turns out, there were a lot. That's why I started climbing mountains - because I long for those things we don't see.

There's an old saying that people climb mountains because they're there. This cute logical fallacy, however, ignores the fact that this is exactly the same reason that other people go around them.

The truth is that there's a lot of thinking that needs to be done on mountaintops, and too few people to make the effort. It's not the climb that's strenuous, though. It's the thinking.

Mountains give us perspective. Standing on a mountaintop is as close as one can come to leaving Earth (without the aid of huge mechanical devices that are so complicated as to defeat the purpose). It's the distance that lends objectivity, and the objectivity allows us to see - to really see - how small we are in the scheme of the overall universe.

I'm not sure what it might be called ("nihilism" would be appropriate, but that term has already been used for something completely different), but it's the opposite of existentialism. It allows us to avoid the question of why we exist - or why anything exists, for that matter - and that brings a unique form of freedom.

Neil Armstrong once described the experience of standing on the surface of the moon (away from the complicated device that got him there). "It suddenly struck me that that tiny pea, pretty and blue, was the Earth," he said. "I put up my thumb and shut one eye, and my thumb blotted it out. I didn't feel like a giant. I felt very, very small."

The same can be said for mountains, though certainly to a smaller degree. They let us look at the Earth - at ourselves - from the perspective of the rest of the universe.

These telescopes that can see halfway across the universe may reveal how huge the universe is, but I think every now and then, we have to look through the other end. When we do, we see how small things are where we live.

When we do, we can see that there are burning bushes everywhere we go.

Oh, to have been the cup
His lips touched and blessed,
To have been the bread He broke,
To have been the cloth
He held as He served,
Or the wine He poured as He spoke.

Oh, to have been the road
He walked along the way,
To have been His print in the sand;
Or the door of the tomb
That was rolled away.
Instead, I was the nail in His hand.