Story time! A good friend of mine called me with an emergency. His car had broken down about an hour into the forest on a camping journey he took with some of his friends. He asked for me to see if I could make my way out in order to help him. I said yes, of course. What else would a friend do?
Little did I know the journey I, myself, would go on trying to aid in the rescue of my buddy. I jumped in my truck and start driving his way about 2 hours into the heart of the forest near Trinity.
With no gps location, just written directions, I venture about an hour north from Weaverville, a small town outside of Redding. At this point, no gps is accessible and it’s about 11 o’ clock at night to make matter worse.
I’m not able to find this turn that I’m supposed to make in order to head in the direction of their campsite. I’m doing my best to stay calm, but at this point, frustration is setting in. Here I am, in the middle of nowhere, lost and with no service. What could get worse?
I look down at my gas gauge. I was a little too close to E for comfort. I’m 30+ miles in on a road in the middle of nowhere about to run out of gas. I had to make a decision… I turned around and headed for the town. God bless, I was able to make it to the town, get gas and eventually just ended up heading home to reassess in the morning.
The morning comes around and at this point, my capacity was at basically 0. My desire to help my friend, knowing what was in front of me, just went straight out the window. He ended up getting what he needed taken care of, car and all. In that moment, I couldn’t help but process the situation.
I knew what it cost me to be a friend in that moment, knowing I said I would help. It cost a lot from me. It left me feeling frustrated at the situation and myself for not sticking it through to help my friend.
As I was praying about it, I felt like the Lord dropped something right into my heart. “When you say yes, you are not just saying yes to the result, you are saying yes to the process.” It really sat with me. It had me thinking, Jesus knows more than anyone, that when He said yes to the Father’s plan, He didn’t just say yes to the result, but the process. I knew He was right and that something in me had to change.
It was hard for me not to see my yes as a yes to the result that I am getting. I think, ultimately, everyone truly battles or has battled with that. Decisions I make that benefit me or add value to my life. But in sacrifice, really in the Christian walk, our yes actually requires something of us, because our yes isn’t just for the end result, it’s for the whole thing.
There was this unraveling of my season that I began to reflect on. I started to see all these areas of my life that I was facing adversity or something new that was harder than the last thing. It was so tiring always fighting to maintain a normal in my life. I began to see that’s where my frustration from the night before came from.
I expected that simply saying yes was enough. It was directed at the result. Yes, I’ll help. But when things came at me that were unexpected, I began to feel that frustration and wanted to back down. “If I had known how much it would cost, I would’ve probably said no.”
Is that really the mentality of a believer though? Is my yes only to my own benefit, or what serves me? Or, is my yes unto something greater, regardless of what stands in the way?
My prayer time was filled with a healthy dose of the Lord showing me that in the things I do, my yes is a yes to everything. If I say yes, I say yes through the good and the bad. Not simply to see a result or glorify the result, but to honor the process.
As someone who is walking through a pretty difficult process with the Lord, it definitely pressed some buttons within me, in the best way possible. My yes to people, situations, and most importanty the Lord, should always be a big yes to the process, just as much as the result.
There’s one thing I’ve learned in the process. Things I know become more real when they work their way from head knowledge to heart knowledge. We never really think about the importance of this reality as Christians, you know, because our feelings are somehow innately, “bad.”
I actually learn way less in my success than in my failure. Processes have shown me, where my yes was attached. My yes in God was attached in the results. The calling, the blessing, the glory, not in the waiting, suffering, and trials. In some ways I can even say that my yes wasn’t even fully attached to the Lord, but what I could get in return.
A few days before, in my prayer time, I was feeling the Lord showing me that He’s more present in this season of processing than He has been in others. Which if you’ve ever been through a deep emotional process, the feeling is the complete opposite. He began to speak that it’s actually in the impurities rising to the surface and the refining that shows how near He is.
The process was pulling away the facade I had built my life on the last year and a half. It was completely burning away my own desire to receive and my unwillingness to give. It was healing the places I had experienced my deepest hurts and filling those places as they came to the surface.
In the process is where I was learning to trust and depend on God. It’s where I am learning to be steadfast as the world shakes around me. It’s what He’s put inside me that truly defines me, not the circumstances and things I’m walking through.
While I can’t say that my yes is fully towards the process and that I still don’t find it hard to navigate those difficulties as they arise. I can say that my awareness of my heart in it has allowed me to relocate my trust. My trust in the truth that anything that I face, I can overcome, because the overcomer lives in me.
I know now how to engage in the tension. My yes can stand the test and hold fast to the end. I can now be able to learn how to trust God in the storm, not just losing my why, because the result wasn’t my first experience.
Everything that’s valuable is worth fighting for. The tension is real, the processes never really ends, and there is always something to overcome in this life when we are moving forward. What defines us, is not our failures, processes, or hard seasons, but our ability to get up and learn from these things in life. To wrestle with God until what He says becomes real to us.
Yes, I may be limping from a hard season, but I know I’ll be walking out of it with an even bigger blessing. The blessing isn’t the result, it’s in the realities of God and His love and nearness becoming realer to me than anything else this world has to offer.
So here’s to a hundred more middle of the night frustating rescue missions to be a man who has a truly honorable yes. That my yes be tried by fire and be the most pure thing that I could ever offer the Lord.
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