Armed with faith on the frontlines
Many organizations and efforts exist to support military service members and veterans in some way. They’re all good and deserve support and there should probably be many more. Then along comes this new one that provides a service and fills a need unlike anything else out there.
It’s called Frontline Faith Project, and it’s a great idea.
The Frontline Faith project gives mp3 players, preloaded with Christian content, to memebers of our armed forces throughout the world. These players are listened to again and again, providing spiritual support and nourishment in times of celebration and despair.
What a great idea. Founder Cheri Lomonte told me that she started this in 2010 after hearing the story of a woman whose son in the service went nine months without a chaplain. “I said there’s no way we can have this,” she told me.
It led to this message on their website:
Imagine facing one of the most difficult, lonely, and challenging times of your life, and finding yourself cut off from spiritual support and Christian community. This is the experience of many of our hundreds of thousands service men and women.
Sometimes our Soldiers, Airmen, Sailors, Guardsmen, and Marines can go for weeks, months, even an entire tour of duty, without attending a worship service or hearing words of comfort from a chaplain.
To help provide spiritual nourishment, Frontline Faith distributes free MP3 players—pre-programmed with spiritual content—to military men and women throughout the world.
They asked military people what they wanted to hear, what they most needed reinforcing. Each mp3 is loaded with seven and a half hours of prayers, devotions, spiritual inspirations, Christian music, firsthand stories of other military families, children’s reflections (“kids don’t have the social filters we do” Cheri told me), messages of hope and inspiration, and classics from Fulton Sheen.
This is cool, think about it. Military prayer books, rosaries, other devotionals do require a certain facility to handle and/or see them. Service members can pop in earbuds and listen to the mp3 players anywhere and under almost any circumstances, whether in a foxhole or a submarine, with little or no light, even on the march or otherwise engaged when both hands are full and they can’t hold something else. But they can listen.
Very cool.
More than two-thirds of America’s active-duty service men and women are Christian, and Frontline Faith honors every request it receives for an MP3 player, providing them free of charge to soldiers of all Christian faiths.
“I want every military person to know how grateful Americans are for our troops and the place they hold in our hearts,” said Founder and Director Cheri Lomonte. “Thank you for defending our religious liberty and all that we hold dear.”
