7 Comments

  1. Sandy,
    This is beautifully stated… thank you!
    There was a time that every call from my church was a call from God asking me to do something… if I could do it (i.e., capable of doing it), I always said “yes.” Then after years and years of this, I burnt out. It’s been a five-year recovery process. So I have learned that because I can do something, doesn’t mean I should say “yes.” Prayer helps me now determine what I should say “yes” to as my motives need to be appropriate and not self-serving. Hope that makes sense…
    Thanks again for sharing a great life lesson.
    -donna

    1. Does that make sense to ME? Honey, I feel like I wrote the book on “every call from my church was a call from God.” That makes perfect sense. Glad to hear you are on the road to recovery.

      1. One more thing (now that I’m fully awake!)… Jesus didn’t say “yes” to everyone’s request… some people asked for healing and instead He retreated to the mountains for prayer!

  2. Well, as you might imagine, having been a pastor’s daughter in a denomination in which “faithfulness in the small things” was somehow twisted around by ME to mean I must always say “yes” and never quit anything.
    Praise God I have grown in my understanding of grace and can actually make a decision fairly quickly when I feel it’s best to say no.
    For years I had a huge issue with disappointing authority figures and I still have my moments but it’s not emotionally crippling as it once was.
    And now sometimes I just say to myself, “I’m a grown up woman who has been through too much to turn myself inside out over whether I’ll teach a class on Wednesday nights or not! I can say “no” if I want to.” It works!

  3. I can definitely relate. I am trying to mature out of that way of thinking, but it is hard. The fear that someone won’t like me is hard to overcome. Besides what if I need help from that person later and I said ‘no’ this time. They surely wouldn’t want to help me later.

  4. That was very wise what that person told you. We should have that attitude. It is tough to say no but doing so preserves the value of our yes’s.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.