To stress the effect of a single, lone punctuation mark on the meaning of a sentence, English teachers, throughout the decades, have passed on an anecdote from the telegraph age.
In the mid-19th century, the telegraph was the internet of the day. It first spanned the continent and then reached Europe with the transatlantic cable. Priced by the word, it was costly, necessitating short, abbreviated messages. One version of this anecdote is as follows.
The Price of a Comma
A woman touring Europe cabled her husband the following message: “Have found wonderful bracelet. Price seventy-five thousand dollars. May I buy it?”
Her husband immediately responded with the message: “No, price too high.” However, the telegraph operator missed one small detail in his transmission — the signal for a comma after the word “No.”
The wife in Europe received the reply: “No price too high.” Elated by the good news, she bought the bracelet. When she returned to the United States and showed the new bracelet to her shocked husband, he filed a lawsuit against the telegraph company — and won!
From then on, telegraph rules required operators to spell punctuation rather than use symbols. No price was too high to avoid the same mistake.
The last blog discussed four “Spiritual Rules of Grammar.” In this blog, I want to identify one more. This rule is frequently violated and often brings about unintended consequences of a “price too high.”
Rule #5: Don’t turn a sentence into a paragraph. (Paul in Acts 21; King Saul in 1 Samuel 13,14; Elisha/servant in 2 Kings 6)
We have a tendency (learned or innate) to build a big picture from a small piece of information, even a single sentence. From this snapshot, we create an entire paragraph or a whole movie.
During my year in Vietnam, I would send home small cassette tape reels that I usually recorded at night. It took a few weeks for the tapes to reach my parents in Iowa and another two weeks to get their reply. Therefore, several months passed before I learned that my parents heard explosions in the background of my taped messages. They assumed that, since I was in a war zone, I was under attack each time I made a recording. Once I learned of their concern, I explained that they heard outgoing artillery, not incoming. Extrapolating a sentence into a paragraph (a sound became an attack) brought them undue worry and concern.
King Saul made the same grammatical mistake early in his rule as king over Israel. In 1 Samuel 13, we learn that Saul faced a daunting attack by his Philistine neighbor. The Philistines had massed an army of 30,000 chariots and 6,000 cavalry, plus too many to count infantry. Saul had started with 3,000 men, but his numbers dwindled from desertion. Saul was down to about 600 men when the Philistine attack was imminent—hardly a fair fight.
Saul then does what we would naturally do: he panicked. 1 Samuel 13:8 tells us that Saul waited the appointed seven days for the prophet Samuel to arrive and make an offering to God. Sometime during the seventh day, Saul took the compound sentence: “Samuel had not arrived, and his army was shrinking,” and turned it into a story of defeat and disaster. His imagined scenario led him to make a fateful decision. He stepped outside his role as king into the role of a prophet, making the sacrifice himself. His false narrative led to unexpected consequences: Losing his heritage as king. (“a price too high”)
A chapter later, we learn that King Saul and his small contingency of soldiers were in a planned retrograde movement: avoiding enemy contact. His son, Jonathon, however, along with his armor-bearer, went on a recon mission to see where the Philistines were camped. He discovers a garrison of Philistines (approximately 200 to 300 soldiers) camped on a prominent hilltop. He turns to his armor bearer and suggests they climb the hill and take on the garrison single-handedly.
Rather than projecting a losing outcome considering their scant resources, Jonathon says to his armor-bearer, “Come, and let’s cross over to the garrison of these uncircumcised men; perhaps the LORD will work for us because the LORD is not limited to saving by many or by few!” (1 Samuel 14:6). In other words, let’s climb the hill and let God write the story. They did, and God did. God wrote a story they couldn’t have imagined. Not only was the Philistine garrison routed, but it also encouraged Saul’s fearful army to join the battle. Even the Hebrews who had defected to the enemy rallied to the cause of Israel.
When we expand our current human knowledge into a future reality, we easily exclude the “X factor” in discipleship. I define the X factor as the unknown or unpredictable influence on a given situation. To some, the X factor in life is “luck,” “fate,” or even “faith.” But for the disciple, the X-factor is none of the above but God himself.
Living by this rule of grammar requires humility, faith, and wisdom. We need to admit that we don’t have all the information needed to project a future outcome, and even if we did, we should not impose on God an outcome based on our logic.
Violating this grammatical rule comes from two errors. One is to think that our current knowledge of reality (the sentence) is adequate to project future results (the paragraph). Thus, we build a false narrative based on inadequate information.
The second is assuming that our current knowledge of reality is all we can and should know, being content with only a partial picture rather than seeking to understand more. The prophet Samuel made this mistake when God sent him to anoint a new king over Israel. He correctly went to the house of Jesse but evaluated his selection based on externals rather than the internal condition of the heart, which God was after. After God rejected all of Jesse’s sons except the youngest, Samuel probably reflected on the choice of King Saul, who looked kingly externally but was devoid of faith internally. How did that turn out?
We can avoid this grammatical error by learning to ask more questions. Rather than assuming I know all that I need to know or can know, I should assume there is more going on than I currently know – or maybe I can know. We should assume that each situation is more complex than we think. For example, when the checkout clerk is rude to us, rather than assuming they are just a rude person or we have done something to offend them, we could consider that maybe they just got the news that their spouse has terminal cancer. How would that thinking affect our response to their rudeness?
When tempted to extrapolate the current sentences of our own story into paragraphs of disappointment, defeat, and disaster, we should remember this spiritual rule of grammar. We need to let God finish the paragraph and write the complete story.
For Reflection
- Reflect on when you projected disaster, and it turned out well.
- Why do you think we so easily assume we know all we need to know about a given situation?