Is there a specific point in your life you can look back on and identify as the moment that changed everything?
The first time I heard a missionary tell me to “just say yes,” was such a moment for me.
I was in Mumbai, India with a group from my church. We were there to put on a spiritual retreat for young women who had been rescued from sex trafficking and were now in a recovery program. During orientation, on the very first day of our visit, the American missionary who was serving there with her husband shared her story.
I don’t remember anything from her story except for one part. Just say yes.
The missionary explained that her path to living full-time in India did not start with her deciding one day to move across the globe. Instead, it started a long time ago with a simple yes to something small. That led to another opportunity and she said yes to that as well. After a series of yeses, the door opened up to go to India. She explained that because she had practiced saying yes to God over and over again, when He called her to go to India it was easy to say yes to that as well.
To her, that story had likely become a mundane part of the rehearsed speech she gave each time she was asked to share her testimony. To me, it was life-changing. I felt deeply challenged by what she had shared. When I returned home and was processing my time in India, I took a moment of honest reflection. I asked myself, “Would I be able to say yes if God asked me today to move to India?” The honest answer was no. After that revelation, my prayer became, “God help me to get to the place where I could say yes to You if You did ask me to go to India.”
Of course, you always have to be careful what you pray for!
If you mean it, God will answer your prayers. Opportunities started popping up for me to say “yes.” Each of them was not something I jumped to do but instead pushed me outside of my comfort zone. My courage and faith grew as I made it through each experience. Saying yes once allowed me to say yes again and then again. These opportunities were not always glaringly obvious as ones that would grow me in my faith, but they were.
After hearing all of this, one might think that the day my husband came home from a short-term missions trip to Haiti, and told me he thought we should move there, I would have jumped at the chance. My actual response was, “over my dead body!”. However, the difference this time (he had mentioned this possibility two years prior as well) was that I was at least willing to pray about it seriously. Because I had practiced saying yes to uncomfortable experiences before, I was willing to do the difficult thing and seriously pray about moving to Haiti. The problem with sincerely asking God if you should do something is that He might just tell you yes!
Just praying about moving myself and my young kids (ages 4 and 6 at the time) to a place that I knew next to nothing about was incredibly stretching. However, I remembered my prayer from six months prior—that my heart would be in a place to say yes if God called me to go to India. Well, it seemed that India was not His plan, but Haiti just might be. I never imagined that He would ask me to move to another country!
Through prayer, fasting, and a couple more not-so-small yeses I was able to say yes to the big step of packing up our life and moving to a foreign country.
The simple words of a missionary changed my life in a way I never could have imagined. Saying yes to God has been insanely stretching but always incredibly rewarding. So today, I want to ask you, what is God putting before you that you can say yes to? You never know where that yes might take you.
