Hank Smith:                      00:03                   Welcome to followHIM Favorites. John and I share a single story to go with each week’s Come, Follow Me lesson. Are you ready for a modern David and Goliath story John?

John Bytheway:               00:12                   Oh, I’m braced. Go.

Hank Smith:                      00:13                   You are going to love this. Erik Weihenmayer. That’s just a great last name. When he was in elementary school, found out that he had a degenerative eye disease. And sadly, tragically, he is going to be blind in the next few years. Sure enough, by the time he entered high school, he was completely blind, but he had worked really hard. His mother had helped him. He was able to stay in a mainstream school, was able to continue his life because they had worked hard practicing for this. He didn’t love that, by the way. He didn’t love practicing to be blind, but his mom was really set that he could fight through this and keep going and have a wonderful, successful life.

                                           00:56                   Sadly, John, even more tragically, after he goes blind, his mother is killed in an accident. He has had some really, really hard times. A few months after that, he was reading a newsletter in Braille about a group of blind students who were going to begin to rock climb, kind of an intro to rock climbing class. He said, this sounds insane. Who would be dumb enough to take blind kids rock climbing? So he signed up. What is there for a teenage boy, right? Besides, hey, that sounds insane. What follows John defies explanation. Erik Weihenmayer, blind since age 14, becomes the first and only blind person to ever summit Mount Everest.

John Bytheway:               01:41                   The biggest rock available to climb.

Hank Smith:                      01:45                   I’d like to rock climb. How about that rock? Not only that, John, he has kayaked 277 miles of the Colorado River. He says the fear of climbing blind comes when I’m reaching out into the darkness, when I don’t know what I am going to find. Every single move, every handhold, every step up the mountain was to go further into darkness with no guarantee what was there. This is not a disability. This is faith. David, going in front of Goliath with great faith says this can happen. The Lord that had delivered me out of the paw of the lion and the paw of the bear, he will deliver me out of the hand of this Philistine. He goes forward and does it. Do you know Erik Weihenmayer calls this his inner vision? Is that interesting?

John Bytheway:               02:34                   Yeah. Faith is an inner vision. I love it.

Hank Smith:                      02:38                   His life motto, what’s within you is stronger than what is in your way.

John Bytheway:               02:43                   Nice.

Hank Smith:                      02:43                   Don’t you love it? Here we have the army of Israel looking at Goliath going, run away. We don’t have a guy this big. And here comes a small shepherd boy who says, who’s that guy? He needs to go down. He is, what does he say? He’s mocking the God of Israel. This is, I can’t stand for this. I’m going to go out there and take care of him.

John Bytheway:               03:06                   And Goliath says, am I a dog?

Hank Smith:                      03:08                   Yeah, that you would come at me with this little boy with his sticks. 2 Corinthians, John, I think it says, we walk by faith, not by sight. And he did that. He did that. We hope you’ll join us on our full podcast. It’s called followHIM. You can get it wherever you get your podcast. We are with Brother Mike Madsen this week. John, we didn’t know Mike very well before, but wow. What a teacher.

John Bytheway:               03:33                   Yeah, it was awesome.

Hank Smith:                      03:34                   We hope you’ll join us there and then come back next week. We’ll do another followHIM Favorites.