My wife will tell you that I am a world-class ear hustler. My mother has accused me of being nosey. Mrs Cosgrove, my eight grade English teacher, once wrote in the margin of the journal she required us to keep that I have an ear for dialogue. And Brother Ed, my tenth grade English teacher, used to say I had a flair for language. In my view, each of these characterizations are slightly off the mark. I prefer to think of myself as a “cultural anthropologist,” who enjoys studying the human species in their natural habitats. LOL.

One fact is certain: I have perfected the art of eavesdropping. Maybe overhearing is a better word—because I don’t mean eavesdropping in the sense of surveillance. I geniunely enjoy listening to how people craft words to evoke meaning, spur conversation, and even silence debate. One Christmas, someone who knows me very well brought me a coffee mug decorated with some of the insults from William Shakespeare’s plays. There are some zingers. My favorite is “thou toad! Desist.” Can you imagine someone calling you a toad? Then commanding you to desist? That’s hilarious. And quite eloquent, to boot.

I share this to let you know that I deeply enjoy a creative turn of phrase, and have notebooks full of them. One of the better turns of phrase that I have heard in recent years occurred when I “overheard” my wife conversing with several of her friends. I’m not sure who they were talking about, but someone in the circle said “the problem that I have with “so and so is that their audio don’t match their video.” As soon as I heard that phrase, my ears piqued. The phrase was felicitous and funny, and was clearly not meant as a compliment.

To say that someone’s audio doesn’t match their video is to say that what they are saying doesn’t match what they doing. To say that someone’s audio doesn’t match their video is to say that their speech doesn’t match their behavior. To say that someone’s audio doesn’t match their video is to say that they are talking a good game, but not playing one. On its face, that phrase is definitely not a compliment. At best, it is a criticism. At worse, it is a condemnation.

But the more I reflected on the phrase, the more it occurred to me that saying that someone’s audio doesn’t match their audio may from one crucial vantage point, actually be a compliment. What changed my thinking was rereading the story of David and Goliath, one of the classic stories of scripture. As Malcolm Gladwell observes in his best selling book based on that story, “three thousand years ago on a battlefield in ancient Palestine, a shepherd boy felled a mighty warrior with nothing more than a stone and a sling, and ever since then the names of David and Goliath have stood for battles between underdogs and giants.”

David was an underdog. David looked like an underdog. And David had the weapons of an underdog. But interestingly, David did not sound like an underdog. Goliath said as much when David first approached him. According to 1 Samuel 17:41-47, this is what happened:

Goliath walked out toward David with his shield bearer ahead of him, sneering in contempt at this ruddy-faced boy. “Am I a dog,” he roared at David, “that you come at me with a stick?” And he cursed David by the names of his gods. “Come over here, and I’ll give your flesh to the birds and wild animals!” Goliath yelled. David replied to the Philistine, “You come to me with sword, spear, and javelin, but I come to you in the name of the Lord of Heaven’s Armies—the God of the armies of Israel, whom you have defied. Today the Lord will conquer you, and I will kill you and cut off your head. And then I will give the dead bodies of your men to the birds and wild animals, and the whole world will know that there is a God in Israell. And everyone assembled here will know that the Lord rescues his people, but not with sword and spear. This is the Lord’s battle, and he will give you to us!”

If you compare how David looked (his video) to how David sounded (his audio), it certainly did not match. Even Goliath both observed and commented on the obvious disparity. Ebonically speaking, Goliath was like “bru, I’m nine feet tall, am a battle-tested warrior. and have on armor for days—and you got sticks—talking all that junk.” I can imagine Goliath thinking to himself “this guy’s audio and his video don’t match.” But that asymmetry was not a symptom of irresponsibility, arrogance, or deceit. Instead, it was evidence of faith. Romans 4:17 says that people of faith “call those things that are not as though they are.” From the vantage point of faith, your audio and video may never match!

As people of faith, what we say will often contradict our resources, our environment, and our capacity.

As people of faith, “we walk by faith and not by sight” (2 Corinthians 5:7).

As people of faith, we can never allow our circumstances to intimidate, overwhelm or silence us.

And as people of faith. we have to keep on talking until our video matches our audio.

What sight says is impossible, faith says it is within reach.

Faith and sight can look at the same data and derive two radically different conclusions.

So don’t let your Goliath intimidate, silence, or threaten you. Believe you can triumph. Develop and deploy the confidence of the Psalmist, who declared “I believed, therefore have I spoken” (Psalms 116:10).