January 16. Malcolm Gladwell. In 2013, Malcom published David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants. Throughout the first year of research on this book, he collected examples of people’s disadvantages turning into advantages.
For example, many American presidents and British prime ministers had lost a parent in childhood. A young shepherd boy beat the giant Goliath.
Malcolm spent time in libraries and talking to social scientists, pouring over research to find how this had happened. Today’s story begins as Malcom meets the Derksens, whose daughter has just been murdered. Surely this disadvantage could never be turned to any kind of good.
Turns out: it took more than twenty years for Candace’s killer to be found. Here’s what Malcolm found out.
Jesus gives ordinary people extraordinary power, if they’re willing.
Malcolm was on his way to Winnipeg to interview Wilma Derksen, whose teenaged daughter, Candace had disappeared on her way home from school. A week later, she was found—her hands and feet bound—and she was dead.
At the time, the search for Candace had become Winnipeg’s biggest manhunt in the city’s history, and as the tragedy unfolded, Wilma and her husband Cliff were called to a news conference.
One of the reporters asked, “How do you feel about whoever did this to Candace?”
Cliff said, “We would like to know who the person or persons are so we could share, hopefully, a love that seems to be missing in these people’s lives.”
Wilma added, “I can’t say at this point I forgive the person. We have all done something dreadful in our lives, or have felt the urge to.”
The Derksen’s lack of vengeance and anger intrigued Malcolm, and he wondered how a family—whose daughter had been brutally murdered—could find such strength.
Wilma told Malcom that her family had emigrated from Russia after suffering persecution for their faith, and she grew up in the Mennonite tradition. “I was taught that there was an alternative way to deal with injustice,” she said. “I was taught it in school. We were taught the history of persecution. We had this picture of martyrdom that went right back to the sixteenth century. The whole Mennonite philosophy is that we forgive and we move on.”
Ironic. Malcolm had grown up in a Mennonite community in Ontario, and his family was full of seminarians and preachers. The running joke back then had been that Malcolm was the only one who hadn’t preached a sermon.
But when he moved to New York, he stopped attending church. He still believed in God. He just held onto the evidence and physical side of God—the logic of the Christian faith. Outside of logic, there wasn’t much he was holding onto.
But with Wilma in her garden, he felt a change in his heart. She was so normal. How could she overcome something so horrible? And he saw what he had been missing in his own faith: the power of Christ.
“It was one thing to read in a history book about people empowered by their faith,” Malcolm wrote. “But it is quite another to meet an otherwise very ordinary person, in the backyard of a very ordinary house, who has managed to do something utterly extraordinary.” The Derksens—through their press conference—showed the whole country the path to forgiveness. That could only be explained by the power of Christ at work in their lives. It was what Malcolm had been missing. He knew he had his own journey to take, just like the people in his interviews. He had been missing the power and beauty of the faith he grew up in. “Here I was writing about people of extraordinary circumstances,” he wrote, “and it slowly dawned on me that I can have that too.”
“My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever” (Psalm 73:26 NIV).
Do you see the power of God working in your life? Do you want to? Jesus gives ordinary people extraordinary power, if they’re willing.
“Malcolm Gladwell: How I Rediscovered Faith.” Published July 27, 2020. Relevant Magazine. https://relevantmagazine.com/life5/malcolm-gladwell-how-i-rediscovered-faith/.
Gladwell, Malcolm. David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2013.
Bailey, Sarah Pulliam. “Author Malcolm Gladwell finds his faith again.” Published October 11, 2013. The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/author-malcolm-gladwell-finds-his-faith-again/2013/10/11/d633d8f4–3266–11e3–89ae-16e186e117d8_story.html.
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