The Surgeon Who Operated Without Power

In 2010, when a 7.0 earthquake leveled Port-au-Prince, Haiti, Dr. David Vanderpool arrived at a makeshift clinic with almost nothing. No electricity. No sterile operating room. No anesthesia machines. Other medical teams looked at the devastation and waited for proper equipment to be airlifted in. Vanderpool did not wait. Armed with a headlamp, a pocketknife he had sterilized with bottled water, and thirty years of surgical training, he began operating on crushed limbs in a parking lot. Colleagues questioned his methods. The conditions were impossible. But Vanderpool understood something the others had forgotten — the power was never in the equipment. It was in the knowledge, the calling, the steady hands that had been shaped for exactly this moment.

When David walked toward Goliath in the Valley of Elah, Saul's armor lay discarded behind him. The Philistine saw a shepherd boy carrying a stick and laughed. Every soldier in Israel saw the same thing — a mismatch of weapons. But David had already done the math differently. "You come to me with a sword and with a spear and with a javelin," he declared, "but I come to you in the name of the LORD of hosts." David knew that the Name of the Living God outweighed every blade ever forged. The power was never in the arsenal. It was in Whose name you carried into the valley.