They have received their orders for the mission but are ignorant of the exact location. They have a rough idea of when, but specific dates are missing. Weeks have been spent on maneuvers, but now they realize that soon it will be live fire zipping over their heads.

Ask any family member, and they will tell you about the knot in their stomachs when a loved one is deployed. They have many questions. They also acknowledge that too many variables lie beyond their control.

Every day, thousands of men and women devote themselves to protecting freedoms, maintaining peace, providing relief, and supporting policy around the globe. We are indebted to those American soldiers.

Across our nation a fresh batch of recruits is mobilizing for deployment. They have received their orders—typically it was a letter of acceptance perhaps even eight or nine months ago. In some cases they even had a choice of where they wanted to go. They will be leaving in the next few weeks. They are headed off to war—"not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms" (Ephesians 6:12). However, we usually don't speak of it in war terms when students head off to college.

But let's not fool ourselves. When they head off to the vast majority of colleges and universities in our nation, they are headed into battlefields of epic proportions. It is a war that can literally be hell—or at least lead to it. Adding to the danger is the reality that this war is being fought on multiple fronts.

There is the battle with atheism (those who say there is no god) and agnosticism (those who doubt the existence of a god). As much as we'd like to think that there are only one or two atheists on large university campuses, the facts speak for themselves. Students confront atheism in all walks of campus life. The April 11, 2010, issue of the Chicago Tribune reported that in 2003, only 42 atheist student groups were registered on campus. Today that number is up nearly five hundred percent to more than two hundred such groups and growing. That same article noted that 20 percent of young Americans are atheists, agnostics, or have "no religion," up from 11 percent in 1988. Battle lines have been drawn!

Now throw in secularism, materialism, humanism, postmodernism, liberalism, and a whole host of other "isms," and we see why God urges us through the apostle Paul to put on the full armor of God (cf. Ephesians 6:13-18). Understandably Christian parents, whose stomachs churn out of spiritual concern for their children, are right now storming God's throne of grace in prayer for the very souls of their children. The battle is real. Precious souls are at stake.