SUNSHINE BAZOOKA

I was shivering in the dark, exhausted and despondent when I heard a man ask, “hey Dredd, how about some Skittles?”

“No, I’m good,” I responded, wanting to be alone in my despair and pain.

“It’s OK,” he said. “I brought three big bags of them.” And he poured some into my hand that I had not realized I had reached out toward him. Then he moved on to the next man and did the same thing, leaving me a little less miserable. There is nothing like a Skittle when you are cold, wet, and hungry.

My misery that night was self-created. In fact, it had been partially my idea. OBT, my F3 co-founder and I had decided what our organization needed was for us to go to Jacksonville the week before Thanksgiving and do a GORUCK training event with the men there.

Because we were in Florida, I decided that I could pack light. So, there I was, wearing nothing but shorts and and a t-shirt, with only a long-sleeved shirt in my bag. Only after we jumped into the ocean and the temperature dropped down below fifty degrees did I realize what a huge mistake I had made. I was not a twenty-five-year-old Green Beret anymore. I was a fifty-five-year-old lawyer, and the wind cut through me like a machete.

Along with the Skittles, Robber (his F3 name) was also dispensing words of encouragement into the ears of us miserable wretches, particularly when the gloom was the deepest. The darker it got, the more Robber encouraged us. He never stopped until the sun came up.

I am not built like that. When life gets dark, I gird my loins and try to power through. If the man next to me loses heart I will goad him to drive on rather than encourage him with Skittles. Not Robber. He is a Sunshine Bazooka who blasts hope into the darkness of a man’s heart when he needs it most, regardless of how much pain he is in.

In the Bible (Judges 5:31), it says that men who love God will be like the sun when it rises in its strength. That is who the Sunshine Bazooka is—a man who fights the darkness with the light to reflect God’s glory.

Every team needs a man like that.