The stories we share as Unitarian Universalists come from so many different sources– today, I share a story with you about a Unitarian named James Luther Adams. He was born in the early 1900s, and he was a minister and a teacher who spent a lot of time studying lots of different stories and ideas. 

One of the stories that James was interested in was a story in the Hebrew scriptures about David and Goliath. David was the youngest and smallest of many brothers who lived in a land called Israel, and they lived at a time when the Philistine army was getting ready to invade, and their army included a great, big giant, named Goliath. 

Now it happened that now a single soul in Israel thought that it was possible to defeat this giant–except for David. So David volunteered, as he prepared to meet the giant, he thought about what it is he would need and decided that rather than a big suit of armor, what he required was something small, something that he could keep close at hand. So he stopped at the river bed and found 5 smooth stones and put them in a pouch– and it was with these that he defeated Goliath. 

This story made James Luther Adams think; he thought: even if we have never had to face actual great, big giants like Goliath, sometimes the things that face us in our lives feel like great, big giants and sometimes these things might make us feel scared. So he wondered– what 5 things do we all need to keep at our sides, as religious liberals, when we feel like the way forward is impossible? And so, he wrote about the 5 smooth stones of Liberal Religion.