By an act of faith, Abraham said yes to God’s call to travel to an unknown place that would become his home. Hebrews 11:8, The Message
Recently, I've been looking at how we discern God's will for our lives, and this produced a bit of conversation in social media. All of which brought me back to A Time for Yes, the book I wrote in 2012. I figured it might be good to serialize a few entries as a way of keeping the conversation going. As a ramp-up, it seemed worth recounting why I wrote the book in the first place.
I had written Say Yes to No with a period of struggle in 2001 (and finished it
around 2008) where I had said, and tried to live out, too many yeses. I’m happy
to say that I’m no longer enmeshed in the stress outlined in the first chapter
of Say Yes to No, but now the
struggle is subtler and never fully leaves. Healthy practices that fight the gradual
onset of what I earlier described as “schedule obesity” (an over-fed commitment
to tasks) are habits that take time to cultivate. And then dogged insistence… I
keep working on the right rhythm of yeses and nos and realize that this is an ongoing
project. (You won’t believe how many times friends have quoted to me, “Greg, I
think you need to learn to ‘say yes to no.’”)
The global economy also helped my cause a
bit, or at least made the need for no even more apparent. The serious economic
crisis of 2008 and its continuation over the past four years, the meltdown of
the stock market, the crisis of confidence in our banks and Wall Street
leaders, all led us to the recognition: we had declared too many yeses for too
long—yeses to buying things we can’t afford. The United States government has
spent too much without sufficient revenue. We’ve bought houses we couldn’t
afford and too many HD TVs on lines of credit.
There is also one additional, subtler element:
With the public relations campaign for Say Yes to No, I began to focus more on
the marketplace. I found myself engaging more business-related topics and
commenting on CNBC.com’s blog, in interviews on Business News Network and
businessweek.com, as well as the American Management Association’s publications
like MWorld and Executive Matters. I began to ask why and realized that calling—or to use a bit more expensive
term, vocation—is critical to what
I’m doing with yes and no.
This experience led to one conclusion
about calling and yes: it’s not just about work, it’s about how we respond to the
whole Triangle of life—our personal life, work, and love.
Finally, yes is basic to faith. As the
noted author Kathleen Norris has written in the introduction to Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith,
human infants “build a vocabulary, making sense of the chaos of sound that
bombards the senses.” She continues, “Eventually the rudiments of words come;
often ‘Mama,’ ‘Dada,’ ‘Me,’ and the all-powerful ‘No!’ An unqualified ‘Yes’ is a
harder sell, to both children and adults.” Actually I had always thought that
nos were harder, that setting out boundaries in a world of seemingly infinite
possibilities posed the greatest challenge. But Norris ties saying yes to
realities of faith.
To say “yes” is to make a leap of faith, to risk oneself in a new and often scary relationship. Not being quite sure of what we are doing, or where it will lead us, we try on assent, we commit ourselves to affirmation. With luck, we find that our efforts are rewarded. The vocabulary of faith begins. Kathleen Norris, Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith
Yes is also central to understanding Jesus
Christ, at least according to the early Christian writer Paul who declared,
In him [that’s Christ] it is always “Yes.” For in him every one of God's promises is a “Yes” (1 Corinthians 1:19-20).
By that, I believe Paul is leading us to see that
God’s final word in Christ is an affirmation. Our nos, as it were, are to make
way for yes. And yes is the main message of this book.
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