Not in That Armor

Addison has to say her memory verse in front of the whole church on Sunday evening, and she has spent two weeks planning exactly what she will wear. The verse is not the problem. Being looked at is. Meanwhile, after Sunday school tells the story of David and the giant, two-year-old Andy falls asleep with his red ball in his fist — and dreams himself down into the valley of Elah, where the armor is far too big, the giant is far too loud, and the smallest person in Israel has exactly one word and one red ball. Andy cannot tell a soul what he dreamed. But when Addison stands trembling at the back of the church in the perfect outfit that is not helping her one bit, a toddler toddles up and hands her something small and round. A dream-episode about going out in your own clothes, in the name of the Lord. Scripture: 1 Samuel 17:47; Psalm 56:3 (KJV).

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Welcome to the Jones Family Chronicles. For life at school, home and church is always full of lessons, laughter, and love. Meet Dad, the pastor's assistant, mom, the heart of the home, and their five bright and lively kids. Allison, Addison, Anna, Ava Grace, and little Andy, who somehow always managed to turn ordinary days into extraordinary adventures. So gather round, open your heart, and let's discover together the joy of faith, family, and the timeless truths of God's Word. This is the Jones Family Chronicles. All right, kids, gather close. Paul has a story for you about your favorite family The Joneses Once a summer the church set aside a Sunday evening for the young ones, and each child stood at the front and said a verse they had learned by heart. Addison had chosen hers three whole weeks ahead of time, the way Addison does things, and she had chosen it because it was short and because she thought it was pretty. Nine year olds are allowed to pick a verse because it's pretty. Then she turned her attention to the important part, which was what she was going to wear. She had it settled by the second week, the dress with the small flowers, the cardigan, the exact green of the leaves in the small flowers, the good shoes, a ribbon she spent eight solid minutes deciding about, because with Addison, the eight minutes were never vanity. The detail was where the meaning lived. If she got the detail right, the whole thing would mean what she wanted it to mean. But the closer Sunday came, the more Addison understood that she had prepared for the wrong thing entirely. She knew the verse. She could say it backwards. The verse was not the problem. The problem was the walk, the long walk up the aisle, and then turning around and every single face in that church looking at her. All at once, Addison, who noticed how everything looked, had never in her life so badly not wanted to be looked at. That same Sunday morning all the children gathered in a big room before class, the way they always did, and Sister Alyssa told them the story of David and the giant. She told it well. She made herself enormous to show them how tall Goliath was, and every child in the room leaned back. She held up her hand to show them how small a smooth stone is. She got to the part where the boy went out with nothing but a sling and the room went quiet. Alison listened and thought about how badly organized the Israelite army was. Anna listened with her whole body and had four questions before the teacher finished a sentence. Ava Grace listened and said nothing at all. Abigail was there too, still brand new, still shining a little, sitting in the middle of them now as though she had always been there. And Addison listened, and thought it was a very nice story, and it did not help her one bit. She had a giant of her own on Sunday evening, and no rocks whatsoever. Andy sat on the floor in the very front with his red ball in his lap. He was two, and two is not an age famous for sitting still. Andy did not move the entire time. He watched Sister Alyssa get big and small and big again, and his eyes never left her, not once. And when it was over he stood up and said Ball and held up his ball, and everyone laughed and thought it was because Andy always said ball. Andy fell asleep that night with the red ball still in his fist. It was a new one, that ball, red as a fire truck, small enough for a two year old's hand. The first one lived across town now. On the nightstand in Pawpa and Nana's room, right where Pawpaw had put it the week his eye came back into focus, and where papa had no intention of ever moving it. Andy drifted sleepily into a valley. It was a two year old's dream, which meant it was mostly feelings and colours, and one very large problem, and it did not bother explaining itself. There were two hills with an army on each and a wide bare valley in between, and the sun and the dust over all of it, and a great many men in a great deal of metal, all standing very still and looking down at the same thing. The problem stood in the middle of the valley, and the problem was enormous. He was taller than the tent behind him. His shield was a door, his voice came rolling up the hillside like weather, and when he shouted the little stones by Andy's feet jumped. Anna was in the ranks in a helmet three sizes too big, talking at a remarkable pace. He's nine feet tall. Somebody said nine feet. Do you see that spear? That's not a spear, that's a fence post. Nobody's going out there, right? Hey, I said nobody's going out there, right? Addison stood beside her and she was doing the thing Addison always did first. She was looking. Just look at him, she whispered. Look how big he is. And that was true, and it was the whole trouble with looking. The giant was the biggest thing you could see, so he became the biggest thing there was. Ava Grace was sitting on a rock a little apart with her chin in her hands being five. He's only big to us, she said. To nobody, and just went back to watching. And down at the very back of the army of Israel where nobody was looking, stood the smallest person in the valley, holding a red ball. The king came down the line, he was tall and tired and not unkind, and he had the look of a man who has run out of ideas and is trying very hard not to show it. He got to the end of the line and stopped, because at the end of the line there was a very small boy who was already walking. The king crouched down. Go, he said, and the Lord be with thee. And then, because he was a king and kings give what they have, but you're not going like that. Take my armor. Alison arrived at once with the armor and a list. Of course she had a list. She buckled the breastplate over Andy and it hung on him like a barrel. She strapped on the greaves and they came up past his hips. She set the helmet on his head and it went straight down over his eyes and stopped at his chin, and she checked her list. And everything on it was done correctly, in order, exactly as it should have been. And there in the dust stood a small pile of somebody else's courage, with a two year old somewhere inside it, unable to move so much as one step. So Andy took it off. He did not argue about it, but it could not have. He simply shrugged out of the whole business. The helmet went one way, the breastplate went the other, and stepped out of a heap of it and left it lying there in the dirt. But that's the armor, Alison said. She sounded almost hurt. The real David said something about that, and it is written down, and Dad has always thought it was one of the bravest sentences in the whole Bible. And David said unto Saul, I cannot go with these, for I have not proved them. And David put them off him. Mom came out of the crowd then and knelt down in front of Andy. She did not straighten anything, she did not fix his hair, she just took his face in both her hands and kissed the top of his head and let him go. Andy picked up his red ball. He walked out into the valley in his own clothes, which is to say his pajamas, and the whole army of Israel watched him go. And the giant saw him coming and laughed until the hills rang. And here's the thing you need to understand. Andy was not brave out there, not exactly. Brave is when you know what the thing costs and you go anyway. And that is a fine thing, and we will praise it all day long. But Andy was too. Andy did not know he was supposed to be afraid. Nobody had gotten around to teaching him that yet. He just saw something loud standing where it had no business standing, and he had a ball, and he went. There is a name for that, and the name is not courage, but the name is faith. Now the real David said something to that giant before he threw. The whole valley heard it and it goes like this. Then said David to the Philistine, thou comest to me with a sword and with a spear and with a shield, but I come to thee in the name of the Lord of hosts, the God of the armies of Israel, whom thou hast defied. And this and all this assembly shall know that the Lord saveth not with sword and spear, for the battle is the Lord's, and he will give it into our hands. Andy did not say any of that. Andy was two. He had one word, and he had a red ball, and every single bit of what David said was in that boy just the same. The name of the Lord, the God of the armies of Israel, the battle belonging to somebody bigger than the valley, all of it. Packed into the only word he had. And he looked up at the giant, he reared back with everything a two year old has. Ball, he said, and he threw. The giant fell. That was all. There was one great sound like a tree going over, and the ground jumped once under everybody's feet, and then the valley was quiet. Quiet the way a house is quiet after the storm has passed over, when you can hear the clock tick. And Andy being Andy toddled out across that enormous silent valley to go and get his ball back. Andy woke up on Monday being completely Andy, and told no one anything because he couldn't. He hit his drum, he ran a truck along the baseboard, he carried the ball around in his fist all week and did not put it down, and nobody thought a thing about it, because Andy always carried the red maul. But that week at devotion, with all five of them gathered in around him, Dad opened the Bible to the seventeenth chapter of first Samuel and read the whole account out loud. Addison sat very still. She heard about the armor that would not fit, she heard about the five smooth stones out of the brook. She heard the boy tell the giant that he came in the name of the Lord and that the battle was not his anyway, and never had been. You know what I love about it? Dad said, laying his hand flat on the page. The part everybody skips. Saul tried to dress that boy up in a king's armor, best armor in Israel. And David took it off. Said he couldn't walk in it. He'd never proved it. So he went out there in his own clothes. Dad turned back a page to the day the prophet came looking for a king in the first place, and passed by every tall, strong brother in the house. But the Lord said unto Samuel, Look not on his countenance or on the height of his stature, because I have refused him. For the Lord seeeth not as a man seeeth. For man looketh on the outward appearance, but the Lord looketh on the heart. God never once asked David to be big, Dad said. He just asked him to go. Addison looked down at her hands and did not say anything at all, which for Addison meant something, had gone in deep. Sunday evening came the way Sunday evenings do, whether you're ready or not. The outfit was perfect. Addison had been right about the ribbon, she was always right about the ribbon. She stood back in the back of the church, and the small flowers and the green cardigan and the good shoes, and she looked up that aisle at the front of the room, at all those faces and all that light, then her legs wouldn't work. And she understood something standing there that she would carry for the rest of her life. She had spent two weeks putting on armor, every piece of it correct, every piece of it buckled on in order. And it did not fit her one bit better than a king's o breastplate fits a two year old, because it was never going to be the thing that carried her up that aisle. Nothing she could put on was. The church was filling in around her, papa and Nana were three rows back in their pew, Sister Ward had Abigail beside her, and Abigail caught Addison's eye and gave her a small fierce nod. One girl who had walked to the front of a church to another. Brother Thompson and Sister Beverly came in and sat down together, the way everybody was used to seeing them now. Brother Thompson saw Addison standing back there, with her hands full of nothing and he stopped. I know that face, he said quietly. First Sunday I ever came through those doors I sat in a back row and nearly walked out twice. He nodded up toward the front. Legs will work eventually. Turns out they were never the important part anyway. Then Andy came around the end of the pew. He had that red ball in his fist the way he had all week. He stopped in front of his big sister, looked up at her the way he always looked up, and held it out with both hands. Ball Andy said. Mom smiled. Anna said something aloud. Alison said Andy gave that ball to everybody, which was true. The family thought it was just Andy being Andy, the baby handing over his toy to whoever looked like they needed something, the way he had handed it to Mom in the hard week and to paw when papa could not see out of his right eye. Nobody in that church knew what Andy knew. Nobody knew what that ball had already done in a valley on a Sunday before, or whose name had gone with it. Addison took it, she closed her fist around it, and she went. It was a long aisle. She did not look at her shoes, and she did not check her cardigan, and she did not fix one single thing, and when she got to the front she turned around, and there they all were, every face in the church looking right at her exactly the way she had dreaded for three weeks. Addison held the red ball at her side where nobody could see it, and she said the verse she had picked out three weeks ago because it was short and because she thought it was pretty. What time I am afraid I will trust in thee. It was not short anymore. It had gotten very large somewhere in the last three weeks, and it turned out to be the only thing in the whole building that fit her. She said it out loud in her own clothes in front of everybody, in the name of the Lord. The church said amen, and she walked back down that aisle with her heart going like one of Andy's drums and sat down and it was done. Mom found her afterward in the fellowship hall still holding the ball, still a little pale. Andy gave it to Meatis and said as if that explained everything. He does that, Mom said. She sat down beside her daughter and tucked a piece of hair behind her ear, and did not say anything for a while, which was one of the best things about Mom. Then she said, You know what I noticed? You didn't fix anything before you went up, not one thing. I forgot to, Addison said. I know, said Mom, but that's the part I'm going to remember. And then gently, he never asks you to be big, baby, he just asks you to go. Ava Grace had wandered up and was leaning on the table, taking all of it in with those enormous eyes. You didn't look scared, she said. I was, said Addison. I was scared. Ava Grace nodded slowly, as though a very old question had finally been settled. I know, she said. That's better. And she went off to find a cookie. Across the hole Andy had located the drum from the Chubbin's class and was giving it the full benefit of his opinion. When he caught sight of Addison he stopped and threw both arms straight up over his head. Happy, he shouted. He was. He had no idea why any of them were looking at him like that, and he never would. He toddled off after Ava Grace to see about that cookie. The smallest person in the whole church who had gone out into a valley in his pajamas that week and come back for his ball. Now, who's ready for brownies?