Yesterday morning, we went out to do street evangelism in a rural community of Haiti. I had fallen asleep the night before just after finishing Malcolm Gladwell’s David and Goliath, and woke up with his arguments still lingering on my tongue, still mulling in my mind.
We split into groups of four and five, each group equipped with a translator and a very vague sense of where we were going, to talk to people and speak into their lives however we could. As we spoke with one woman and her granddaughter, a gentleman stood beside our translator and very matter-of-factly told him where his house was, and that we would be going there next.
It was a short walk to his home, through a few low-hanging banana tree branches and down a rock-trodden path. When we arrived, there he was, sitting in his chair, ready to receive us. He was so excited. He eagerly offered our translator a seat, and began chuckling—hearty, holistic expressions of this man’s overflow of joy.
We shared our names and where we were from, and asked to hear his story. His name is David. He grew up catholic, but didn’t meet Jesus until adulthood, after his brother was hospitalized. The doctors had all but given up hope on his brother, and no one else was there to read aloud a book given to him by missionaries about who God is. David read at his bedside, thinking all the while, “Of course I know who God is.” Of course. He had been in the church his entire life. But as David read to his brother, he realized he didn’t know God at all. But now he wanted to. In fact, he could think of nothing else.
The book David and Goliath is about redefining advantages. It’s about how the underdog isn’t such a creature to be pitied, after all. The first chapter of the book talks about the illusion of Goliath’s strength. He was big, and a warrior, true. But as Gladwell points out, he required an assistant with a shield, moved slowly and unresponsively, and likely suffered from a medical condition that would have both explained his gargantuan size and caused him detrimental vision problems.
“What the Israelites saw, from high on the ridge, was an intimidating giant. In reality, the very thing that gave the giant his size was also the source of his greatest weakness. There is an important lesson in that for battles with all kinds of giants. The powerful and the strong are not always what they seem.
David came running toward Goliath, powered by courage and faith. Goliath was blind to his approach—and then he was down, too big and slow and blurry-eyed to comprehend the way the tables had been turned. All these years, we’ve been telling these kinds of stories wrong. David and Goliath is about getting them right.”
Haitian David was saved when he was 33 years old. At 82, he sat on his porch, framed by shade against the turquoise wood wall, telling us of the ways he was blind to God’s grace.
It would seem to most people that growing up in the church—in any Christian church—is a surefire funnel into a life of Christianity. But what they don’t realize is the numbing power of repeating, week after week, that you know a God whom you’ve never met, and never asked His name. If not used well, that funnel can become a stopper, and you’ll find people turned away from hearing the Good News, rather than being eager to learn it for the first time.
Growing up, I was a catholic Goliath. I had the war medals and the doctrinal repertoire to be a successful catholic girl. I volunteered in religious education. I helped run VBS. I sang hymns without looking at the lyrics, and never once accidentally crossed my right hand over my left in receiving the eucharist. I was rocking it. And to my understanding, if God had to choose between me and someone who’d never set foot in church a day in their life, He’d be crazy not to pick me.
What my impressive catholic girl resume did was instill in me a false sense of completion. Christianity to me was a set of boxes, and I had checked off every one. So when people came along later in my life, wanting to share the Gospel, I shrugged them off, essentially saying, “I know who God is. I don’t need you to tell me.”
The problem was that I had no idea who God was. And there He was the whole time, trying to introduce himself through one person after another, while I turned away. I’ve never been very tall, but my pride turned me into a giant, and I was completely unprepared for how God’s Word could smack me square in the head.
I told David that I loved hearing his story. It reminded me of mine. I asked if I could take his photo and the agreement was I would have to take a photo with him first. I turned mid-photo to tell him to “souri” (smile). When it was time for me to take his portrait, he stood up, taller than I realized. But I recalled that height isn’t everything, and sometimes the thing making you feel so big and strong is the very thing keeping you from unlocking the greatest strength in the universe.
