Know-Love-Obey God

For the High Calling Blogs book club:
Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die,
by Chip Heath and Dan Heath
Laura Boggess leads our discussion on chapter one.

I am thinking of four repulsive men. If I met them in person, I would find it hard not to cringe at them. I would have to resist the urge to turn and run from these four men, their skin putrid with disease. No one else wants to be around them, either. The four are outcasts.

But I love these guys! They are four of my favorite people, ever. They inspire me and help me think straight. They are the four lepers who, when Samaria was suffering both famine and a Syrian siege, were caught between a rock (the city in famine) and a hard place (the Syrian camp).

Now there were four men who were lepers at the entrance to the gate. And they said to one another, “Why are we sitting here until we die? If we say, ‘Let us enter the city,’ the famine is in the city, and we shall die there. And if we sit here, we die also. So now come, let us go over to the camp of the Syrians. If they spare our lives we shall live, and if they kill us we shall but die.”

- 2 Kings 7:3-4

Like I said, I love these guys! They actually reasoned themselves into courage!

The four got up, entered the Syrian camp, discovered it was deserted, and had free access not only to food and drink but to all the spoil: silver, gold, clothing, livestock. In this way they played a key part in Elisha’s prophecy being fulfilled, to top it all off (2 Kings 7:1-16).

The four lepers became brave and decisive because, in every “if” they considered, the result was that they would die anyway! They showed me that the certainty of an outcome can move us to bravery and action.

These four great guys in famine and siege demonstrated the flip-side of a psychology study explained in our new book club selection, Made to Stick. In chapter one, the authors cite a Tversky & Shafir study on how decision-making and an uncertain future are related:

[I]magine that you’re in college and you’ve just completed an important final exam a coule of weeks before the Christmas holidays. . . .

You’ve got to wait two days to get the exam results back. Meanwhile, you see an opportunity to purchase a vacation during the holidays to Hawaii at a bargain-basement price. Here are your three options: You can buy the vacation today, pass on it today, or pay a five-dollar fee to lock in the price for two days, which would allow you to make your decision after you got your grade. What would you do?

- Heath & Heath, Made to Stick, page 35

Some students were told they passed the exam. Fifty-seven percent of this group bought the Hawaii trip.

Other students were told they failed the exam. Fifty-four percent of this group bought the Hawaii trip.

A third group of students were not given their exam results. Sixty-one percent paid five bucks so that they could decide after getting their exam results, even though they probably would have decided to buy the Hawaii trip whether they passed or failed.

Tversky and Shafir’s study shows that uncertainty—even irrelevant uncertainty—can paralyze us.
- Heath & Heath, page 36

If this study shows that uncertainty paralyzes us into indecision, the story of the four lepers shows that certainty moves us to decision, action, and bravery.

In God, I have many, many certainties, like:

God will never leave me nor forsake me.
Jesus is coming back.
I have an eternal inheritance in Christ.
The earth will pass away.

How can these certainties give me bravery for today? How can these or other certainities give clarity and obvious action to a choice I’m waffling over?

What do I fear that is completely irrational? In what areas am I stuck in inaction, and it doesn’t make any sense to be stuck? What “if” questions can I ask that will reveal any “DUH” thinking? What do I unneccesarily fear?