Saying Yes

Everyone has their spiritual gift. In my family, our spiritual gift is taking perfectly good worship songs and making them nearly useless by tweaking the words to suit our own purposes (my brother is particularly good at this--and congrats to him and his fam on the birth of baby Eliot!).

We've been working with our particularly strong-willed 19-month old girl on saying "yes" to us rather than her favorite word: "no." We needed a new refrain.

Enter "Trading My Sorrows."

"Trading My Sorrows" is a splendid praise song that regularly repeats this simple chorus:

"We say yes Lord, yes Lord, yes yes Lord!
Yes Lord, yes Lord, yes yes Lord!
Yes Lord, yes Lord, yes yes Lord, Amen!"

Some of you might guess where this is going. A simple exchange of "Lord" for the words "mama" or "daddy" and voila, we've got instant obedience! Zoe regularly walks around singing "Yes Mama, yes Mama, yes yes Mama!" It's music to our ears.

As we've laughed (and sometimes squirmed) about this around this house, it has struck me how much I actually want this to be true. So many times the parent-child relationship is characterized (or caricaturized) as a "no" relationship. I've been challenged recently to think about vision for my home. Here's my vision for my home: I want us to be a "Yes" house.

God says "yes" to us in Christ, says Paul in a letter to the Corinthians. So we say "yes" to one another as an echo of God saying yes to us in Christ. We say yes to our children's character, we say yes to love and laughter and joy and wisdom and safety and respect making and marking our home. And so we say no sometimes. But the no alway serves the yes, just as God's "no's" to us always serves his final and ultimate "yes" to us in Christ.

God always comes at us with a yes to every good blessing in Jesus Christ. The only time he says no to us is when we say no to that. So God says, "I want to bless you with every good thing in Jesus Christ." And we say, "No, I don't want that. I want to do my own thing." And so God, in his mercy says, "No! I will pursue you with this blessing though it takes all of your life, and though it leads you all sorts of unnecessary tribulation." His "no" only comes in response to our "no" as a vehicle for his "yes." Or to put it another way, his "no" always serves his "yes."

And in keeping with that, I hope that someday my kids will say that my "no's" always served a greater yes: yes to Davis, yes to Zoe, yes to the baby due any day now, and yes most importantly to the God who shouts his "yes" that echoes throughout all eternity.