The Wow Factor

Yesterday, I started talking about the reasons behind doing the story of David and Goliath as our first forray into the Mecha Manga Bible Heroes universe. One consideration that was a major factor on my part was the way David is seen as a person and how that one event changed his life forever.

For the early part of his life, David was the youngest and smallest of a large family of herdsmen; Just like today, the closer you got in David's society to "hands on" work, the lower on the totem pole you were... and in David's case, you didn't get much lower. So low was David, in fact, that when Samuel visited David's father and asked to see ALL his sons, Jessie conveniently forgot to even call for David. You get the picture that, had Samuel not pressed him, Jessie would be trotting out the more atheletic and handsome neighbor kids before calling little Dave from his sheep watching duties.

All this is not to say that David didn't do a dangerous and (at times) more exciting than you'd care for job. On more than a few occasions, David was called upon to kill bears and lions that easily had height & weight advantages on him, using nothing more than rocks, sticks and bare hands.

Being out in the wild, beating down fierce animals and doing hard, "manly" work didn't build David a humble and soft spoken disposition either. From all Biblical evidence, David was bold, brash and almost arrogant young man... traits that helped push David into the position of fighting Goliath.

David steps into the situation of both literally and figuratively taking on the single largest problem his country had faced up until that moment, and found an unconventional way to solve it. Yes, God was David's "co-pilot," but David had also been training for this moment for a lifetime.

This one act would define David his entire life, and would be both his greatest and his most pure triumph. One may ask- what happens to someone who has their greatest accomplishment before the age of 18?

Exploring that question and what that one act of defeating Goliath set into motion, not only for David but for every person in David's life, is what makes David so perfect for such a story. Every success and every failure is magnified and filtered by that moment, and David grows into a wiser and more complex person before our eyes... and as in many heroic stories, David's earliest mentor will soon become his greatest adversary...