The Adhesive Nobody Wanted

In 1968, a chemist named Spencer Silver was working in a 3M laboratory in St. Paul, Minnesota, trying to develop a super-strong adhesive. Instead, he produced the opposite — a gentle, low-tack glue that stuck to surfaces but peeled away cleanly. His colleagues shrugged. Management passed. For six years, Silver wandered the hallways of 3M, pitching his "failed" adhesive to anyone who would listen. Nobody wanted it.

Then one Sunday morning in 1974, a colleague named Art Fry stood in his church choir loft, frustrated that his bookmark kept slipping out of his hymnal. He remembered Silver's strange, rejected adhesive. He brushed some onto a small slip of paper, pressed it to the page, and it held — then lifted off without tearing. That moment of ordinary frustration became the birth of the Post-it Note, now one of the most recognized office products on the planet, generating billions in revenue.

The adhesive every engineer dismissed became the foundation of an empire.

Psalm 118 knows this story. "The stone the builders rejected has become the cornerstone." The Almighty has always worked this way — taking what the world discards and placing it at the center of everything. What others overlook, God ordains. What seems like failure in human hands becomes, in His hands, the very thing that holds it all together. This is the day the Lord has made. Even the rejected parts.