Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 14:11 — 8.2MB) | Embed
There’s a tiny hidden house tucked at the base of a tree in Disneyland, built for a leprechaun who was never real. There’s an empty enemy camp outside a starving city, packed with food nobody touched until four outcasts broke their silence. And there’s a tree that made a line look longer than it really was, guarding a secret some people never wanted shared. Three stories, one thread. Today I’m talking about the danger of keeping good news to yourself, and why the best thing you can do with something good, is give it away.
Welcome to Stuff I Learned Yesterday, this is episode #718, “Disneyland Jesus.” I’m Darrell Darnell, my favorite Disneyland easter egg is the Little Man of Disneyland, and I believe that if you aren’t learning, you aren’t living.
Are you familiar with the Little Man of Disneyland?
When Disneyland opened in 1955, a Little Golden Books story came out that same year called The Little Man of Disneyland. It’s about a leprechaun who lived in the orange grove trees that used to cover Anaheim. When he finds out Walt is turning his orange grove into a theme park, he strikes a deal so he can stay and live inside the park.
Kids loved the book so much they started showing up at the park asking where the little man lived. The problem was leprechauns aren’t real, and the story was made up. But Disney got flooded with enough requests that they eventually built a tiny hidden house inside the park, just so kids had somewhere to look. That house got torn down during a renovation years later, but in 2015 it came back. If you know where to look, you can still find it tucked at the base of a tree in Adventureland, right by the sign for Indiana Jones.
I love little details like that. The kind of thing you’d walk right past a hundred times and never notice, until somebody points it out to you, and then you can’t stop looking for it every time you’re there.
A couple years ago, I got to be that somebody for my friend Chris.
It was Chris’s first trip to Disneyland. He’s a huge Disney fan, loves Halloween, loves The Nightmare Before Christmas, so we planned the trip to be inside Disneyland on Halloween. I wanted his first time in the park to be everything he’d built it up to be in his head.
I knew Chris loved the classic Disney movies, so I made sure his very first steps into the park were straight into Fantasyland. We walked down Main Street USA, through Sleeping Beauty’s castle, and made our way to the Alice in Wonderland ride, since Alice was his favorite.
While we waited in line, I pointed out the big yellow mushroom near the entrance. Today it’s just decoration, part of the scenery. But from 1958 to 1982, that mushroom served a different purpose. Back then, getting into Disneyland only cost you a small entry fee, but riding the actual rides meant buying a separate book of tickets. You’d tear a ticket out and hand it to an attendant at whatever ride you wanted to go on. That mushroom used to be the ticket booth for Alice in Wonderland.
That was the first fun fact I gave Chris that week. It was nowhere close to the last.
I showed him the hand painted light bulb above Coke Corner, half red and half white, there to balance out the pattern of colored bulbs strung along the shop’s entrance. Legend has it that Walt himself came up with that fix. I also showed him the blinking bulb over in Cars Land that blinks a little longer every third time.
I debunked the old rumor about the surveying marker near the castle. I pointed out hidden Mickeys scattered everywhere, and dug up easter eggs hiding in Pirates of the Caribbean, the Haunted Mansion, the Disneyland Railroad, the Matterhorn, Midway Mania, the Incredicoaster, and more rides than I can list here.
But I also know rides aren’t the whole trip. Vibes matter too. So we took time to slow down and take in the quiet corners of the park, the spots with the good views, the right smells drifting by, the music playing low in the background, the kind of spots where the nostalgia can overwhelm you.
When we got home, Chris told me it felt like he’d had his own private tour guide the whole trip. He said I’d helped him have the best Disneyland experience he could have imagined.
But here’s the thing. Why wouldn’t I share all that with him?
I had information I knew would make his trip better. And nearly every bit of that information, I hadn’t discovered on my own. I’d learned it from other Disney fans, guys like Chris Provost from Provost Park Pass and Mark Brickey from Hey Brickey. I’ve watched their videos for years, soaked up what they know, and I love every chance I get to pass that knowledge along to somebody else.
Which brings me to a story from the Old Testament, in 2 Kings chapter 7.
The city of Samaria is under siege. Inside the walls, there’s a brutal famine going on. People are desperate, starving. Sitting just outside the city gate are four men with leprosy. They’re just as hungry and desperate as everyone else, but the city won’t let them in because of their illness. So they’re stuck, caught between a starving city and an enemy army camped nearby.
These four guys talk it over. If they go into the city, there’s no food, they’ll starve. If they stay put, they’ll die right where they’re sitting. So they figure they’ve got nothing left to lose. Might as well walk over to the enemy camp and surrender. Best case, the enemy shows mercy and lets them live. Worst case, they get killed, but they were dying anyway.
So they walk toward what they expect is enemy territory, braced for whatever happens next. Instead they find the whole camp sitting empty. Tents still standing. Horses and donkeys still tied up. But not a single soldier in sight. God had caused that army to hear the sound of a massive army approaching, and they’d panicked and fled in the night, leaving everything behind.
The four men duck into a tent and eat and drink, since they’ve been starving for who knows how long. Then they start grabbing silver, gold, and clothes, hiding it away for themselves.
But eventually their conscience catches up with them. They look at each other and say, this isn’t right. There’s a whole city back there starving to death, and we’re sitting on good news and keeping it to ourselves. They know if they wait until morning to tell anyone, they’ll be in the wrong for it. So they get up and immediately head back to the city.
They call out to the gatekeepers and tell them what they found. The news works its way up the chain until it reaches the king himself. The king is suspicious at first, figures it’s a trap, maybe the enemy is hiding out in the countryside hoping the Israelites will come out so they can ambush the city and take it. But one of his officers suggests sending a couple men on horseback to check it out, and sure enough, the report comes back true. The camp really is empty. Word spreads through the city, and people rush out to gather up everything the enemy left behind, saved from the death they thought was certain.
Here’s what I learned.
When you find something good, something that changes your circumstances for the better, you don’t get to sit on it. Those four men could have kept eating in that tent and hiding treasure for themselves while an entire city starved a few hundred yards away. Instead, something in them knew that wasn’t right, and they got up and went and told somebody.
That’s exactly what we’re called to do with the gospel.
Jesus didn’t leave this as a suggestion. In Matthew 28, right before he leaves earth, he tells his followers to go and make disciples of all nations, teaching them everything he’s commanded. Paul tells Timothy to preach the word, to be ready in season and out of season, whether it’s convenient or not. Peter tells believers to always be ready to give an answer for the hope inside them, and to do it with gentleness and respect. And in Romans, Paul asks a string of questions that boil down to this: how is anyone supposed to believe in someone they’ve never heard about? How are they supposed to hear without somebody telling them? Somebody has to go. Somebody has to tell.
When I share the gospel with someone, I’m not doing anything different than what those four lepers did outside Samaria. I found something. I found the best news I’ve ever come across, that God loves us, that Jesus died and rose again so we could have a relationship with him, that we don’t have to earn it, we just have to believe it and receive it. Stop living for our wants and desires, start living for God’s. And once you’ve actually tasted that, once you know what it’s like to go from starving to fed, it feels wrong to keep quiet about it.
That’s the encouraging part of the story. But there’s a warning buried in it too, and I’ve got a Disney story for that one as well.
There’s another Disney YouTuber I’ve loved watching for years, a guy named David Erickson from the channel Fresh Baked Disney. I actually ran into David in the park one day, and he’s just as friendly in person as he comes across on video. He loves sharing Disneyland secrets with his audience, and one of the tips he shared a few years back was something called the “tree trick.”
Out in the esplanade, where the ticket booths are before you scan into the park, there used to be a row of trees. One of those trees partially blocked the view of two of the entry gates. Because you couldn’t see the gate clearly and because that line had to bend around the tree, that line looked a lot longer than it actually was. In reality, it was one of the shortest lines in the whole esplanade, and using it would get you into the park faster.
When David shared that trick on his channel, the tourists in his audience, people like me, loved it. We thanked him for the tip. But the locals in his audience didn’t share that enthusiasm. Some of them got genuinely upset. To them, that tree trick was a locals-only secret, something that helped the people who go to Disneyland all the time get an edge over the crowds. And here David was, handing it out to everybody.
A year or so later, Disney removed that tree, so sadly the tree trick is no more.
But I think about that story as a warning for how easy it would be to treat the gospel the same way those locals treated the tree trick. Like something we found that benefits us, and we’d rather keep the advantage for ourselves than share it with people who don’t already have it; people we see as different from us. As Christians, we can’t afford to be like that. We can’t find the best news in the world and then guard it like it’s ours to keep.
And it’s not enough to just avoid hoarding it. We’ve got to actually share it clearly and simply too. Nobody needs a theology lecture to hear good news. The four lepers didn’t walk back into Samaria with a complicated explanation. They just said, I found food, come and get some too. That’s it. Just like a beggar who stumbled onto bread would tell another beggar where to find it, I want this podcast and other conversations I have, to be a simple, clear way of pointing people toward a relationship with God so that your life can be changed just like mine was.
So here’s my encouragement, and it’s for everybody listening, whether you already believe or you’re still working through whether any of this is true.
If you’re a believer, I hope this is a nudge to stop sitting on the good news you’ve already found. You don’t need a stage or a microphone. You just need to be willing to say something to the people already in your life. If you’re not a believer, or you’re somewhere in between, I hope you’ll hear this the way I mean it. This isn’t someone trying to sell you something. This is someone who found bread when he was starving, and now I can’t help but tell other hungry people where to find it.
And maybe that’s the real little man of Disneyland. Not a leprechaun hiding in a tiny house at the base of a tree, but the idea behind why that story ever caught on in the first place. Kids heard something good and they couldn’t stop looking for it, couldn’t stop talking about it, couldn’t stop wanting other people to find it too. That’s what good news does. It spreads because people can’t help themselves.
Don’t be the guy hiding treasure in an empty tent while a whole city starves down the road. Go tell somebody what you found.
I’m Darrell Darnell, and this has been Stuff I Learned Yesterday.
I want you to be a part of the next Monday Mailbag on November 30th! Monday Mailbag is your opportunity to share what YOU’VE learned, so that other listeners and I can learn from YOU. It can be a message as short as 30 seconds or several minutes long. It really doesn’t matter just as long as it’s something that will benefit others. You can send in questions or responses to my SILY episodes, and I’ll respond to them via Monday Mailbag episodes. You can participate in Monday Mailbags by visiting the Golden Spiral Media listener feedback page at goldenspirlamedia.com/feedback.