Category: 2019

It was March 11th, 1989, and I was standing outside the nursery in the Bradley County Hospital in Cleveland, Tennessee, looking through the glass at the bassinet labeled “Hardgrove”. The babies were lined up, as if in a display case at a high-end department store. The Hardgrove bassinet was the third from my left, and it held my second child, my first and only daughter, who was lying in a room among a dozen or so other little bundles of joy, tightly wrapped in receiving blankets like burritos in a Taco Bell to-go box.

In the military, soldiers are required to have what is sometimes called a “go-bag,” or a “bugout bag.” It is a duffle bag packed with everything a soldier is required have if suddenly called to deploy, night or day. All the soldier has to do is grab that duffle bag and go, because everything needed to go to battle is in the bag. In a way, Paul is describing the go-bag of the believer. What Paul describes is the spiritual armor we should put on now, because it’s go-time. The battle is on, so we must be ready to deploy, to withstand and to stand “against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this age, against spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places.”

Several years ago, my friend bought a vintage 1967 Camaro with a perfect body and flawless interior. He would sit in that car for hours dreaming of driving it around town. It looked great in his garage and he visited it often because he was very proud of it. The problem was … it had no motor. On the surface it looked great, but it had no motor so it had no power. Nice to look at, but it was worthless as a car because it had no motor.

Have you ever felt like you didn’t belong? Like everyone else was in on the joke, but you. They had a way of talking and interacting that you didn’t quite understand, and you always felt awkward no matter how hard you tried to fit in. Let me give you an embarrassing example from my own life. Other than the second grade and half of the third grade, which I attended in Smyrna, Tennessee, my entire childhood and teen years were spent in areas of the country where 99 percent of the people were white. It wasn’t until I went to college, and later in the Air Force, that I really began to have relationships with people of other races and ethnicities. At first, I was awkward, but I was willing to put myself out there even if I got it wrong, because eventually I’ll figure it out and get it right.