Spiritual
Judo
.
Hope
for our suffering
.
by Sam Williamson
I reached my
fitness high water mark at the age of
twenty-four. I ran thirty miles a week,
sweated three hundred pushups a day, and I
brawled each week in the local boxing club.
In the midst of my peak physical prowess
(never mind its short duration), I met a man
with a black belt in Judo. He was forty-ish,
chubby, and he wheezed as he walked. I think
his exercise routine consisted of lifting
large bottles of beer rather than heavy
barbells.
He was the first black belt of any kind I had
ever met. He intrigued me. Could this chubby,
middle-aged man really beat me in a friendly
fight? The fool inside me challenged him to
hand-to-hand combat.
Not since infancy have I spend so much time on
the ground. The lawn and I became intimate
allies. I huffed, puffed, wheezed, and groaned
(and maybe cursed, but it’s still all a blur)
as he repeatedly—and effortlessly—tossed me to
the ground.
It didn’t matter what punch I threw. Each jab,
hook, and uppercut finished with me staring at
the sky, gasping for air, and wondering what had
happened.
How do they do
that?
After my embarrassing attempt to box a black
belt, my pudgy pal explained the mechanics. He
said that the secret is to get your enemy’s
strength to turn traitor against him, to
redirect his force so that it is working for
you.
Whenever I tried to punch, my friend slipped
aside and pulled. My own momentum—aided by his
tiny tug—threw me off balance. My own strength
became my biggest enemy. The stronger I
attacked, the harder I fell.
God works the same mysterious way in our lives.
He doesn’t create the evil in this world, but he
redirects it so that it battles its own
architect. As Joseph said to his brothers, “You
meant it for evil, but God meant it for good.”
It’s called spiritual judo.
The runt
Look at the life of David. Samuel comes to
David’s father to anoint a king, but David isn’t
invited to the party. The prophet asks David’s
father if anyone is missing, and David’s father
responds, “Everyone is here but ‘the youngest’”
(1 Samuel 16:11).
But the Hebrew word translated “the youngest” (hakaton)
has layers of meaning. It’s hard to translate
because it combines the picture of youthfulness
with a sense of insignificance. To merely
translate it as “the youngest” isn’t disparaging
enough.
A better translation is to say, “Everyone is
here but ‘the runt.’”
David was considered so insignificant by his
family that he was left in the fields. There he
practiced the slingshot to perfection. If the
runt David had been treated with respect—if he
had trained with King Saul’s army like his
brothers—David would have cowered before Goliath
like the rest of them.
Instead, God turned the wounding insult—“the
runt”—on its head. He used the wound to create a
hero. He hired the enemy’s force to fight
against the enemy.
What is our hope?
David became King of Israel through spiritual
Judo; and your life and my life depend on this
spiritual truth:
God is unsatisfied with merely neutralizing
evil; God employs even evil to effect its own
destruction.
God is the ultimate Black Belt. Our hope for the
suffering of our lives is our Father’s spiritual
redirection, our Father’s spiritual Judo.
Psalm 57 describes it this way: “They set a net
for my steps; my soul was bowed down. They dug a
pit in my way, but they have fallen into it
themselves.”
Sam
© Copyright 2016, Beliefs
of
the Heart, Ltd. All rights reserved.
 Sam
Williamson grew up in Detroit, Michigan,
USA. He is the son of a Presbyterian pastor
and grandson of
missionaries to China. He moved to Ann
Arbor, Michigan in 1975. He worked in London
England from 1979 to 1982, helping to
establish Antioch,
a member community of the Sword of the
Spirit. After about twenty-five years as an
executive at a software company in Ann Arbor
he sensed God call him to something new. He
left the software company in 2008 and now
speaks at men’s retreats, churches, and
campus outreaches. His is married to Carla
Williamson and they have four grown children
and a grandson. He has a blog site, www.beliefsoftheheart.com,
and can be reached at
Sam@BeliefsoftheHeart.com.
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