When You Need More ‘Yes’
Many years ago I dragged the kids to a fabric store so that I could buy what I needed to make Emerald a cheerleading outfit. When you live in small-town Texas where football rules the fall, it’s pretty much a prerequisite of the season that all little girls must have cheer suits to wear to the games.
I remember wandering around the store for quite some time after finding the pattern, painstakingly trying to determine what I needed to buy. I checked and double checked the materials and sizes. I tried to figure out why I would need this or that and whether this fabric or that one was right. Finally, I just bought a bunch of stuff and brought it home, with no real notion of exactly how I was going to craft this outfit.
Don’t worry, I had done this before. I have always had a tendency to try to sew things that are way beyond my skill set. A year earlier, I had put my mediocre sewing skills to the test when I made a full-shirted Colonial times dress for my first-born to wear. To this day I have no clue how I managed to make that dress, with my lack of sewing knowledge or ability. But somehow it happened. And I was really hoping it would happen again with this cheerleading outfit.
When I’m in the fabric store buying stuff for these projects, I am preparing to undertake something that I actually know very little about. But that doesn’t stop me from buying the materials and diving right in. I wish I could learn to be more like that in the Christian life. I wish that when God calls me to something, even something small, I would just say yes, even when I have no clue how it’s actually going to get done, when I don’t feel that I have the skills or the knowledge to make it happen.
Because when we say yes to something that we don’t feel like we have the ability to do, then what we are really saying is, “Yes, God, I need you to do this. I need you to shine here because I am about as mediocre as they come.” And maybe if we tried saying yes when we are feeling less than capable, we would find out that God is quite a tailor, sewing straight seams to hide our crooked ones, quick and creative, patient and capable. When He lives inside of us, the truth is that He makes us able where we were weak. More than a tailor, with each stitch He heals us. He makes something beautiful. And He guides our hands to craft beauty, too.
Maybe I need more yes. Each yes that is clothed in humility and weakness is a yes that is destined for something brand new, created by the Savior: a beautiful transformation from “I can’t do this” to “Look what God did.”
I won’t keep you in suspense. I did figure out how to sew the cheer uniform. It wasn’t the kids of sewing job I’d want someone looking at too closely, but I did somehow make it happen. If I hadn’t figured it out, I did have a back-up plan. I was thinking that a Colonial times dress would be a neat twist on football game attire.