Some stories are so powerful that they seem to come already carrying their own biblical frame.
That was true of my conversation with David Truong on Created in the Image of God.
David was born in Vietnam near the end of the war. After the fall of Saigon, his family faced the grim reality that many South Vietnamese families faced: stay and live without freedom, or risk everything to escape. His father, an officer in the South Vietnamese Air Force, had passed up an earlier chance to evacuate because of obligations to extended family. He soon realized that staying had been a mistake. What followed were failed attempts, danger, separation, smuggling, refugee camps, and eventually arrival in America.
As David reflected on his family’s story, he used the language of Exodus. And rightly so.
There was bondage.
There was flight.
There was wandering.
There was a promised land.
That is not forced allegory. It is how human beings actually make sense of life. The old stories endure because they are not merely old. They describe patterns that keep recurring: oppression and deliverance, fear and faith, forgetting and remembering, wilderness and home.
David’s family lived that pattern in modern form.
What struck me most was not only the hardship of the journey, but the spiritual clarity with which he sees it now. He spoke about how, in writing his memoir Escape to America, he came to understand more deeply what his parents had really done. They were not superheroes. They were, in his words, essentially ordinary young people asked by love to do extraordinarily hard things.
That may have been the deepest line in our whole conversation: we are capable of doing hard things when love is what drives us.
His parents endured prison, secrecy, separation from their children, and the constant possibility that every goodbye might be final. They did it because they wanted their children to live in a world where they would have choices. That, for David, is one of the deepest meanings of America: not wealth as such, not image, not ideology, but the gift of freedom, of possibility, of choice.
And that brings me to the second great theme in our conversation.
America as hero—through its people
David said something that is rare to hear in our current climate. He said that America is the hero of his story.
He did not say America is perfect. He did not say the Vietnam War should be romantically retold. In fact, he was careful not to flatten history into propaganda. He understands complexity. He understands suffering. He understands that wars have mixed motives and terrible costs.
But he also insisted on adding something to the dominant narrative.
For him, the story does not end with failure. Because of that war, millions of Vietnamese eventually came to America. Families like his were introduced not only to a new geography, but to democracy, religious liberty, and a different imagination for what life could be. Those principles did not arrive as abstractions. They arrived embodied—in soldiers, advisors, aid workers, churches, immigration systems, neighbors, and institutions.
That distinction matters.
America, in David’s telling, is not heroic as a slogan. America is heroic through its people.
That resonated with me deeply. I’ve lived in multiple countries, traveled in many more, and in my past travels I was often unsparing in my critique of America’s excesses, contradictions, and blind spots. But during my 10 years in Germany, and my extensive travels throughout Western and Eastern Europe, I came to see more clearly, from that distance, that there really was no country quite like it. Since returning I’ve understood more fully why America is indeed exceptional. Its diversity is unusual. Its absorptive power is unusual. Its capacity to take people from all over the world and let them become part of the national story is unusual.
David gave that truth a face.
He has gone to speak with Vietnam veterans because he does not want them to die believing their service meant nothing. That is a remarkable act of gratitude. He is not trying to rewrite history. He is trying to complete the picture. He is saying, in effect: whatever else that war was, some of us are here because of it, and we are proud Americans who would never have had this life otherwise.
That is not a talking point. That is testimony.
And it is also a useful corrective for our age of ideological overreach. Today every human story is quickly drafted into some larger argument—immigration, nationalism, race, empire, victimhood, grievance. David resisted that. He simply told the facts as he understood them and let the richness remain richer than the narratives trying to swallow it.
That too is a kind of integrity.
The hidden leaven
The third thread that stayed with me is where David is going next.
After writing Escape to America, he launched a Substack called The Leaven, and I hope many of you will subscribe to it:
The LeavenSharing stories of remarkable people hidden in plain sight that lift us up.By David Truong
Its subtitle is beautiful and revealing:
“Sharing stories of remarkable people hidden in plain sight that lift us up.”
That is exactly in the spirit of the Created in the Image of God podcast.
Jesus said the kingdom of heaven is like leaven hidden in flour until the whole loaf is changed. The leaven does not call attention to itself. It works quietly. Invisibly. Transformatively.
David told me he wants to write about the kinds of Christians and human beings the public rarely notices—people whose names are not famous, whose deeds are not self-advertised, whose faithfulness changes lives anyway. Quiet saints. Encouragers. Hidden stabilizers. Men and women who carry the kingdom into the world without demanding applause.
In a culture built around noise and self-display, that instinct is precious.
It is also no accident that someone with David’s story would end up there. His family’s journey to America was not accomplished alone. As he wrote, he discovered just how many people entered the story for a moment and helped carry it forward: a mechanic, a resort manager, immigration officials, a prince in Malaysia, strangers, smugglers, helpers, believers. The family did not save itself. Grace kept arriving through people.
That is leaven.
And so is his brother Stephen, whose late conversion to Christianity and death from liver cancer became, in David’s words, the last gift he gave him: faith. Stephen did not preach at him in a heavy-handed way. He showed him what faith in Christ looked like when God does not heal the body, when pain remains, when death still comes. That witness changed David’s life.
That too is leaven.
One of the reasons I find The Leaven so compelling is that it stands against the cynicism of our age. Many people today have met enough hypocrisy, enough performance, enough institutional failure, that they have become suspicious of the very word “Christian.” David’s answer is not argument. It is witness. He is essentially saying: I wish you had met the Christians I have known.
What a line.
And what a mission.
If you want to read writing that is quiet, humane, grateful, and grounded in the reality that God often works through hidden people in plain sight, I encourage you to subscribe to David Truong’s Substack, The Leaven:
The LeavenSharing stories of remarkable people hidden in plain sight that lift us up.By David Truong
The promised land, and the warning inside it
There was one more note in David’s story that deserves attention.
He compared his family’s arrival in America to entering the promised land. But he also noted something else: once life gets better, we forget God. Like Israel after deliverance, immigrant families can become focused on survival, achievement, comfort, and success. Gratitude fades. Dependence fades. The very blessing becomes the environment in which memory grows weak.
That, too, is part of the Exodus pattern.
The promised land is real. So is the temptation to forget who brought you there.
Perhaps that is why David’s story matters now. It reminds us not only that America can be a place of deliverance, but that gratitude must be cultivated or it evaporates. It reminds us that national greatness is never merely structural; it lives or dies in the moral and spiritual habits of the people. And it reminds us that God’s work in history usually comes through hidden leaven rather than spectacle.
David Truong’s life traces a line from Saigon to America, from refugee to citizen, from inherited struggle to chosen gratitude. But his deeper message may be even simpler:
God’s providence often looks, in real time, like ordinary people helping one another survive long enough to reach freedom.
You are created in the image of God. So is the stranger, the refugee, the veteran, the mechanic, the brother, the quiet Christian at the edge of the frame. If we had eyes to see it, we might discover that much of what still holds this world together is hidden leaven.
And sometimes the promised land is recognized most clearly by those who nearly drowned trying to reach it. Something to remember as we approach our 250th anniversary of “The Great Republic of the West.”
Sneak Peek: What’s Coming Up on Created in the Image of God
Next on Created in the Image of God:
- Sunday, July 5 at 7AM US Central time: I interview Tremper Longman III, Old Testament scholar, theologian, and author, on the wisdom, complexity, and enduring relevance of Scripture, and how the Bible continues to speak to modern questions and challenges.
- Tuesday, July 7 at 8PM Central time: I interview Jennifer J. Wiseman, astrophysicist, author, and science communicator, on the wonder and mystery of the universe, and what scientific discovery can teach us about life, purpose, and faith.
From ancient texts to distant galaxies, we’ll keep exploring the deeper questions that inspire awe, reflection, and faithful living.
As always:
You are created in the image of God, and God loves His creation.
