Giants

He’s Goliath, this tiny preschool African boy with skin of creamy cocoa and beautiful wide eyes. He stands in the center of the rug, smiling and shrugging his shoulders in embarrassment, though he was the first of all the children to volunteer.

We sing together again—all of us from Myanmar and Nepal and Sudan and Somalia and the US—the song of David and Goliath. “Only a boy named David, only a little sling. Only a boy named David, but he could pray and sing…”

And the sling goes round and round and round and round and round and round and round. We watch one invisible stone go up in the air…and the giant comes tumbling down. Though this little boy’s tumble is in slow motion, and he never stops smiling.

Goliath becomes Nepalese, then Burmese, each tumble getting more dramatic. And then it’s almost time to go, so the storyteller wraps it up with this truth:

God wins. God wins over the giants.

I look around at these precious children from all over the world, encircled by listening parents and grandparents, and I wonder if they know that God wins.

Have they seen God defeat their giants? The fact that they are safe, here in this room in the basement of our church, shows me that God cares. Most of them have refugee status, which by definition means they had to flee the horrors of war, persecution, or disaster—or all three. And now they are here.

Just minutes earlier I sat in the back of a classroom full of adults who never even could go to school in their home countries. I wonder how that can happen. They never were given the gift of reading and writing, and here they now sit at tables and chairs, learning.

Their teacher patiently goes through a grocery store ad with them. What are the sale dates? What are the prices? What is a pound? For some, it has been currency. But here, it is weight. Most have known kilos and kyats and now must learn pounds and dollars. It is all so confusing.

I can’t imagine. Their giants are so much bigger than my giants.

Yet they work together, they smile, and they resolutely return to class day after day. They want to learn this new language, our strange ways. They need to, in order to survive.

I love these people. I love that they are here in my church. That they choose to spend fifteen minutes watching their children act out the story of David and Goliath. That they share with us their colors and their languages and their smiles and their skills.

I love that they we can share with them the God of the Bible. Some may never have learned about Him. But that little African boy, the first Goliath? His name means “God with us.” I’m guessing he knows, or his mom does.

And the rest of them? I want them to know hope, too. Hope that God wins.