Seven Steps Into Muddy Water

In 1982, a young chemist named Gertrude Elion stood in a Stockholm concert hall to receive the Nobel Prize for developing the first effective drug against leukemia. What most people never learned was that her breakthrough compound, 6-mercaptopurine, almost never made it past the laboratory. Early trials showed mixed results, and colleagues urged her to abandon the formula for something more promising. But Elion kept refining, kept testing, kept walking forward when every reasonable voice told her to turn back. The drug she refused to abandon has since saved the lives of millions of children.

Naaman nearly walked away too. He was a decorated Syrian general, accustomed to grand gestures and impressive displays of power. When Elisha told him to wash seven times in the Jordan, a river so unimpressive it would barely qualify as a creek back home, Naaman burned with indignation. He wanted fire from heaven, a dramatic laying on of hands, something worthy of his rank. Instead, he got mud between his toes and servants begging him to simply obey.

But on the seventh dip, when the brown water of the Jordan rolled off his shoulders, his skin came up clean as a newborn's. The Almighty did not need a spectacular river or a spectacular method. He needed a man willing to trust a word that made no sense and follow it all the way to the end. Obedience that stops at six is still disobedience.