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 two.

It is a custody battle of sorts. Two women are fighting over who should have the child, an infant boy.

Each woman is her own legal representative. The first presents her evidence, giving full details. “So you see, your honor, the child should be mine.”

The second woman then presents her own case, giving arguments and counterarguments. “No, your honor, she is lying. I have the rights to this child.”

One of the women is lying. What will the court decide?

The judge deliberates, but only briefly. His black-robed arm reaches for the gavel as the anxious women await his verdict. Which side will win? Or will the judge decide on shared custody, perhaps one getting the boy on weekends and the other on weekdays, or each woman getting equal time?

The judge, also a king, speaks his verdict clearly, calmly, and authoritatively:

“Bring me a sword!”

The observers in the courtroom gasp in shock. The women are taken aback. Why does the judge need a sword?

Each woman had her own baby boy, born three days apart. One of the babies died in an accident, so his mother traded babies in the middle of the night, the dead for the living. The mother of the living baby realized that the other mother switched babies and took it to court. No one else was in the house; there were no other witnesses.

Solomon had no lie detectors or DNA testing at his disposal, so he used another effective indicator: the unexpected. In his God-granted wisdom, Solomon declared:

“Let’s get the facts straight. Both of you claim the living child is yours, and each says that the dead one belongs to the other. All right, bring me a sword.” So a sword was brought to the king.

Then he said, “Cut the living child in two, and give half to one woman and half to the other!”

(1 Kings 3:23-25 NLT)

A sword and pending bloodshed in the courtroom! Using shock value, he went straight for the heart. By threatening sudden death to the child, he exposed the real mama (“Oh, no! Give her the child! Don’t kill him!”) and the lying woman (“All right, he will be neither yours nor mine; divide him between us!”).

Then the king said, “Do not kill the child, but give him to the woman who wants him to live, for she is his mother!”
(1 Kings 3:27)

Solomon’s surprise judgment quickly revealed the truth. Neither woman had time to think of a clever lie or scheme. The real mother loved her baby so much that she was willing to give him over to the other rather than have him die. Selflessness was an indicator of true love. And it was all revealed via the unexpected.

In chapter two of Made to Stick, the authors give a fascinating assessment of surprise.

Unexpected ideas are more likely to stick because surprise makes us pay attention and think. That extra attention and thinking sears unexpected events into our memories. Surprise gets our attention. . . . Surprise can prompt us to hunt for underlying causes, to imagine other possibilities, to figure out how to avoid surprises in the future. . . . If we want to motivate people to pay attention, we should seize the power of big surprises.

- Heath & Heath, Made to Stick, pp. 68-69

In addition to effectively gripping someone’s attention, making our messages memorable, and stimulating creative thinking, surprise can have another value:

The unexpected reveals who you really are. It uncovers the heart.

(Part 2 of this week’s book club chapter, coming soon . . .)