We all love a good David and Goliath story. In fact, many of us secretly wish our own lives could be a little more like David and Goliath. If only we could take all of our problems and lump them together into one big Goliath that we can then slay with a single stone’s throw and then live happily ever after. The problem with this plan is that we fail to consider what happened to David after He slew Goliath. To be fair, he had his moment in the sun where everyone cheered his name and no doubt he was more than a little relieved merely to have survived the encounter, but how did David’s life turn out after that one fell swoop where he slew the giant. It was definitely not happily ever after. For one thing, Goliath was not the only Philistine that David had to fight. He was more or less at war with them for pretty much the rest of his life. That would have been bad enough, but soon after he became a military powerhouse, David was very quickly the subject of King Saul’s jealousy, such that the King tried to kill him multiple times. His life didn’t immediately improve once the King died either, because almost immediately one of the chief generals of the armies rose up in rebellion against David and also tried to kill him. And besides fighting his old enemies, the Philistines, and his own people, a whole host of new powers in the nearby regions went to war with him. And if all that wasn’t enough, his own family tried to kill him. And then eventually, although admittedly it was his fault, the prophets and the Lord turned their backs on him. The point is, we are doing ourselves no favors by reducing all of life’s problems into one giant Goliath for us to slay and then expecting that to be the end of it. No matter how big our Goliath is, and no matter how swiftly and surely we slay him, all of those problems we packed into that Goliath will eventually pop back up for us to deal with again. To be fair, David did have an incredible life with lots of amazing experiences, but it was not all sunshine and roses after he defeated Goliath. He had a hard life, just as we all are likely to have hard lives, no matter how many Goliaths we slay. It feels good to kill our Goliaths, and we should feel proud of ourselves for finding the courage and strength to do the right thing, but we should not be discouraged when new problems start to arise. As long as we go forth in the Strength of the Lord, we can kill a thousand Goliaths, and then a thousand more after that. Goliath is not the end but the beginning. Each time we come off victorious from a fight that seemed impossible, we can trust our Heavenly Father a little bit more that He will always be with us, and that He made us strong enough to overcome all of our foes.
