Homefront Battles: You’re Not the Only One Still Fighting

Overcoming the Homefront Battles — Part 1 of 2

This is the first post in a new series here on the blog, adapted from discussions at our Discipled Veteran Wednesday night gatherings — real conversations for veterans and their spouses about fighting the battles that follow you home.

During World War II, the fighting wasn’t only happening overseas. Back home, everyday life changed dramatically. Food, gas, and clothing were rationed. Communities ran scrap metal drives and planted victory gardens. Women and those who couldn’t serve in uniform took jobs as electricians, welders, and riveters to help build the armaments the war required. Every American, whether in uniform or not, was fighting on some front.

Every veteran understands that principle instinctively, just maybe not the way we’re using it here. You came home from your deployment, your enlistment, your years of service — and discovered a second battlefield waiting for you. It doesn’t come with incoming fire or a deployment order. It shows up in your thoughts, your choices, your relationships, and the daily grind of ordinary life. We call these the homefront battles.

The List We Don’t Like to Make

Try this. Take sixty seconds and, silently, make a list of the struggles you’re currently facing — not your buddy’s struggles, not what you think you should be dealing with, but the real ones. For most of us, that list brings up something: excitement that we’re finally naming it, frustration that it’s still there, maybe hopelessness or a defeated attitude that says nothing is ever going to change.

If any of that describes you, you’re in good company. Every believer — combat veteran or not — carries a list like this. The Christian life was never advertised as a life without struggle. It was advertised as a life with a Commander who has already secured the victory, even while the fighting continues.

Our Theme Passage

“Wherefore seeing we also are compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which doth so easily beset us, and let us run with patience the race that is set before us, Looking unto Jesus the author and finisher of our faith; who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is set down at the right hand of the throne of God. For consider him that endured such contradiction of sinners against himself, lest ye be wearied and faint in your minds. Ye have not yet resisted unto blood, striving against sin.” — Hebrews 12:1-4

Hidden in these four verses is a pattern for how we fight the homefront battles well. We’re not alone in the fight. We have a choice to make. We have to be honest with ourselves. We have a purpose bigger than our own comfort. We have a standard set for us by Christ Himself. And eventually, we have to answer a hard question about how far we’re willing to go.

That pattern is going to shape everything we walk through in the weeks ahead — anger, depression, communication, and more. But before we get to any of that, there’s a more basic question worth settling first: why do we struggle in the first place, and is there actually an answer, or are we just supposed to grit our teeth and drive on?

That’s exactly where we’re headed in Part 2. Click Here to go to Part 2

Join Us at Discipled Veteran in Springfield, Missouri

You don’t have to fight the homefront battles alone. Discipled Veteran is a brotherhood of veterans and their spouses growing in genuine faith in Jesus Christ together — no lecture, just honest conversation, Scripture, and the kind of comradery you remember from the service.