Life audio. Hi from the Salvation Army, and you're listening to Words of Life. These are the words, these are the words, these are the words of life. These are the words, these are the words, these are the words of life. Welcome back to Words of Life.
We are honored to have this special guest with us for the next three weeks. If you're in the Salvation Army world, especially in the USA South, you probably already know this man. He is a Salvation Army officer, a passionate speaker, a kind soul. And he joins us to share his testimony as well as a project that he's been working on.
So ladies and gentlemen, here is Bernie Dake with Lieutenant Colonel Eddie Hopgood. Welcome back to Words of Life. I'm Bernie Dake, and I am so excited today because we have one of my favorite. People on the planet. He's my friend.
He's my former boss, and you might know him as Lieutenant Colonel Eddie Hobgood. Eddie, welcome back. Hey, thank you. It's nice to be, I guess, home. Exactly.
Yeah. Back in the ATL. ATL, home for a lot of years. It has been said that if you teach a kid to blow a horn, he'll never blow a safe. And honestly, that is part of your story.
Absolutely. Not that you were destined to be a bank robber, but. You were someone that was taught to make music on a cornet way back when, and it changed the course of your forever. And we want to tell your story again right here on Words of Life. Yeah.
Yeah, absolutely. And music is a huge part of my development, the transformation of my life, but also even to this day, music has been a constant in my life. a lot of years kept me on the straight and narrow.
So yeah, it's a huge part of my story.
Well, we're going to talk about that.
So let's go all the way back to the beginning. Our listeners need to know who is Eddie Hobgood, where did he come from? How did he grow up? And then we'll tell them some of the highlights along the way because you really have had, like we were just talking about, a global impact in your ministry.
Well, I'm not sure about a global impact, but I've been around the globe.
So that's. Kind of mind-blowing, especially when you stop and think about where I started. Hey, you're listening to the Salvation Army's Words of Life. We're going to take a quick ad break and we'll be right back. Step into the world of power, loyalty, and luck.
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Someday, I will call upon you to do a service for me. Play the Godfather now at champaccasino.com. Welcome to the family. Necessary VGW group void where prohibited by law 21 plus terms and conditions apply. I was actually born on Easter Sunday in Norfolk, Virginia.
You know, Easter is a Sunday that we celebrate, new life. But on that particular Sunday it wasn't such a a great celebration. I was born to a single woman who was actually uh in the uh i guess the oldest profession in the world they say My mother was a prostitute. She had gotten pregnant by a young man who was in the military, and he shipped out, and so she gave birth to me. You know, when I was born.
She didn't want to see me, she didn't want to touch me, she didn't want to have anything to do with me.
So they took me away. I never felt that embrace at birth of my birth mother and never knew her. I never knew my birth father. There was a young couple. From the eastern part of North Carolina, Greenville, North Carolina, who had been married for several years and could not have children.
So they wanted to adopt and somehow. Greenville, North Carolina, and Norfolk, Virginia, hooked up. And I was, a few days after being born, was brought down to Greenville, where I grew up. About two years after I was born, my mother was able to conceive and had four children. Wow.
So I have four siblings.
So, yeah, and life was good. My dad had his own business. And my mother was a full-time homemaker, obviously. But then one day he got cancer. And it didn't kill him, but it shook him.
He went into this really deep depression, became an alcoholic. And because of that, we lost everything. We lost our house, lost a car. Uh everything. And so I had to move to the wrong side of the tracks.
Four or five is when that happened. Up until I was about 17 or 18, we lived in that section of town.
So it was pretty rough. There were some days. We didn't know where we were going to get our meal from. Yeah. If we were going to be able to make the rent, that kind of stuff.
So it was a pretty rough. Curi growing up. But at some point in the course of your life, you're introduced to the Salvation Army. What's that story? I had been attending, not regularly, a church, but just laid out because I was poor white trash.
You know, some of the folks at the church, they just kind of, you know, look down at you, you know, and didn't want the kids to play with you or anything like that.
So I was not happy at this church. And, you know, and nobody was forcing me to go because my father and mother were not Christians at the time. Like he was drunk. You know, he began having an affair. My mother to retaliate, she started having affairs.
These were open affairs right in front of us. She became an alcoholic and drinking, and it was just really bad at home. And I guess church was kind of the place to escape. It wasn't a place of escape because I was being judged for things I had no control over. One Sunday afternoon, and back in the day, they had this thing called Blue Law.
And so stores couldn't open. Only the drugstore or a restaurant could open.
So it was really quiet. People stayed in their homes for the most part. Sunday afternoons were quiet time. And I remember one Sunday afternoon, I was just kind of sitting around the house, and all of a sudden, I heard this noise. Music.
And I'm like. The circus, the circus has come to town.
So I jumped up, I ran out, ran to the end of the block. Thinking I was going to see the circus, but I saw this group of men and women. Uh dressed in these dark black uniforms. And there was a guy beating a big bass drum. There was another guy, later found out was the corps officer, Wayne McCart, playing a cornet.
His wife Susan was playing the accordion. Uh, and then there was this um rather rotund lady singing at the top of her lungs, Have you been to Jesus for the cleansing power? And I looked at these people like, Wow, I found my people. That's right, you know, like, wow, who are these people? I want to get to know them.
So, the uh, the guy, when he finished beating the bass drum, while the officer's giving the devotion, he's walking around talking to the folks in the crowd. And he says, You know, we have programs on Tuesday afternoons for kids. You know, we'll come and pick you up. I'm like, What? You'll come and pick me up.
So, I started going to the youth activities and character building on Tuesday afternoons. And then it wasn't long, just a couple of weeks or so, where they said, We have this music program. And they put a cornet in my hand. And at the time we had a college student working at the core. going to East Carolina College then I g it's university now.
And he started uh teaching me how to play the cornet. And then he gave me a couple of piano lessons, and it totally changed my life. Wow.
You know, like I said, I was a kid living on the wrong side of the tracks. You know, I was getting into mischief, and honestly, my future didn't look all that bright. I didn't need sunglasses. But this gift that the Salvation Army gave me. Totally changed my life.
It is true that the quote that you said, now I'm not sure that I was destined to blow safe, but it taught me discipline. It taught me responsibility. It gave me a skill set that when I actually left elementary school and went into junior high, and we had band and music programs and orchestra and all that sort of stuff, it. Set me on a track that I would have never ever been on. And honestly, I don't know that I would have, but I would have most likely dropped out of high school.
But it was this music program that I was involved in at school, but also at the same time simultaneously with the Salvation Army. Because at the Salvation Rami, it wasn't just locally at the core, but early on I got involved with divisional events.
So, you know, I auditioned and got into the divisional youth band at the age of 12, which was crazy. Yeah. And then with that, you know, you get involved in other things, other divisional events, singing groups, drama groups, and you become involved. And really, it becomes a part of your life.
So at home, Life was just absolutely horrible. Just absolutely horrible. After I started going to the Army, a couple years into it, you know, the Army came fatefully every time the door was open and picked us up. and carries to church because mother and father couldn't do that. But eventually my mother started attending the Army, And one day she got saved.
Praise the Lord. And that started a transformation in her house. And it wasn't long after that. that my dad got clean and sober. And he got saved at the Salvation Army.
And so life was actually turning around. He got a great job. Uh and you know life was going really good. We pray that you're enjoying and being blessed by this conversation. We're going to take one more ad break and we'll be right back.
At fifteen. December the first. My dad, who had actually been selected, elected, I guess, to be the chief of police in a nearby town, was coming back home. Greenville is the county seat. And he was coming to the county courthouse, and he was killed in a head-on collision.
with a with a dump truck. He was killed instantly. Yeah, this Once again, just kind of turned uh our lives upside down. But, you know, he had been saved like six months before this happened.
So all this great stuff was happening at school. All this amazing stuff was happening at the Salvation Army, and finally, all this good stuff was starting to happen at home. And then this tragedy struck. I have to say, the Salvation Army family just surrounded us and loved us and walked with us every step of the way through that journey. And that was transformational for me.
I gotta backtrack a little bit. I started going to camp. I got to go to youth camp and I got to go to music camp. and uh youth camp I made a real serious decision to follow Jesus. Amen.
And then the next week, two weeks of camping, on the Sunday afternoon concert, they gave a call to officership, and I felt this. The strange Warm feeling, this desire. that I needed to go forward and give my life to Selfish Army officership.
Now, I was only 12 when that happened. but it never left me.
So, as I got older and thinking about what I want to do with my life, this culprit never really faded. As I got a little bit older, I started getting very interested in this young lady at the Corps that I had known since I was nine. She was never really that interested in me, but I was very interested in her. But when we became teenagers, we started dating. Kathy, my wife, my now-wife, Kathy.
47 years. The other half. The other half, she had felt called to officership, too.
So this was kind of a you know a no-brainer thing. Yeah. So we got married and we knew we were gonna go to training. As happens, there are people who say, Well, you need to go now. You need to go now.
And, you know, we'd like a couple years, you know, like to be married. And then, after about a year of marriage, this. Maternal, paternal thing kind of kicks in. We'd like to have a child, and then we'll go. Everybody says, Okay, all right, all good.
But a year went by, we couldn't conceive, and another year went by and we couldn't conceive. And so we sought some professional help, and the verdict came back: you know, there's a physical problem you probably should think about adopting. Yeah. Which I had been adopted, and you know, and I have this little special place in my heart for those kinds of things.
So we said, okay, in that case, then the excuse for not going to training yet is gone.
So we go to training. This is August, we go in August. And in December, Kathy was pregnant with our first child, Annie.
So, you know, that taught me a lesson of faithfulness, you know. Uh God's going to take care of things, you know. You do what I'm asking you to do, and I'll take care of it.
So, yeah. The Salvation Army's mission, doing the most good, means helping people with material and spiritual needs. You become a part of this mission every time you give to the Salvation Army. Visit SalvationArmyusa.org to offer your support. You can subscribe to Words of Life on your favorite podcast store or visit SalvationArmysoundcast.org.
Join us next time for the Salvation Army's Words of Life. These are the words, these are the words, these are the words of life. These are the words, these are the words, these are the words of life. Thanks so much for listening to Words of Life. We want to thank the team at Life Audio for their partnership with us on the show.
Visit lifeeaudio.com where you'll find dozens of other faith-centered podcasts in their network. They have shows about prayer, Bible studying, parenting, and more. Thanks again for listening. We'll see you next time. Hi, I'm Dr.
Michelle Bankson, a board-certified clinical neuropsychologist and host of your Hope-Filled Perspective podcast. After 30 years in the mental health field, I am passionate about helping you regain hope and transform your life. Join me and my amazing guests as we tackle real life struggles. With compassion, vulnerability, and biblically based insights. If you're ready to renew your mind and find practical solutions to life's most common concerns, subscribe now on your favorite podcast platform: How to Have Fun Anytime, Anywhere.
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