My giant may not be your giant.

​As we face the heat of this past weekend and what we expect this week, I find myself needing to confess my intolerance for heat which may seem odd considering where I grew up.  I am the kind of person that if the indoor temperature in our house goes above 72 degrees, I adjust the heat pump to cool the house down to at least 70, preferably 68 degrees.
How this is at odds with where I grew up is that I still remember, as a teen, hearing, “Good morning, it’s 7am, current temperature is 102, humidity is at 97%. Expected high of 112 with 100% humidity.”  That was a typical summer day forecast. A side note on hometown memories deals with tourists. My hometown had a lot of snow bird visitors in the winter and lots of tourists in the summer who came for our beaches.  These visitors provided my friends and I with at least two regular occurring amusements.  One was watching a tourist get out of their car in their bare feet onto an asphalt parking lot. You could almost hear the sizzle of the soles of their feet as we watched them do some free style dance moves while they hurried back into their cars. The other was at the beach, where washed up jelly fish were a regular sight. For some unfathomable reason some tourists thought it a good idea to jump up in the air and land down, again bare footed, onto the washed-up jelly fish to burst it open. This yielded some liquid onto the feet and legs of the tourist that was rather unpleasant to the skin so we were again rewarded with some rather interesting moves on their part.
The reason why I shared about where I grew up is that if they would see our weather app that states, “extreme heat warning” and the listed expected temperature was under 110, they would likely question our fortitude.  Living in Tacoma, I have seen such a warning when the temperatures are not expected to reach 90 degrees.
This comparison made me think of David when he faced Goliath. When David first said he would face Goliath, King Saul questioned his logic.  David explained that he had faced lions and bears as he protected his father’s sheep. We read in 1Samuel 17:36 [“Your servant has killed both the lion and the bear; and this uncircumcised Philistine will be like one of them, since he has defied the armies of the living God.”]  David may not have faced a giant before, but he had faced the lion and the bear. Those encounters helped prepare him to face this giant.  He knew the God who gave him strength to face the lion and bear was with him now.  
We all face giants in our lives and draw on the knowledge that the God who helped us face the lions and bears in our lives will help us face those giants.  The thing is, what is a giant to me may be a lion or bear to others.  What others see as a giant to tumble, I may see as a defeated lion or bear. Just like those from my home town may not understand that we are not used to facing what is to them normal temperatures, we may not always understand why something is a giant to someone else that does not seem so big to us.
In those moments, we need to seek to show empathy, remembering that we are not all wired alike. We are to remember to be there for each other.  Whether we see a giant or not, our brother or sister in Christ needs to hear the words, “I’m here for you, let’s bring this giant down together.”.
Have a blessed week.