Saying Yes

How to Go with Your Gut

My husband has to practically pull my teeth to get me to watch his favorite comedies like Grandma’s Boy or Ace Ventura: Pet Detective. One movie that I do not mind as much is Yes Man, a film in which Jim Carrey plays a character who decides to say “yes" to everything instead of constantly turning people down.

This kind of sounds like a nightmare in real life.

What Jim Carrey's character finds out is that accepting more favors and more assignments is double-sided. It does get him into trouble when he over-extends himself, but he does not let that deter him. He predictably wins the day and gets the girl and leaves viewers feeling warm and fuzzy, but can it be that simple in real life?

Constantly saying yes to other people's requests will likely allow others to take advantage of one's goodwill. This might not always be the case, but it certainly leaves you vulnerable to the greed and selfishness of others. What happens when we do the opposite and wall ourselves off from the world for our protection? How do we strike that balance?

There is another way we leave ourselves vulnerable to emotional pain and injury, and that is by saying yes to our conscience. How many times have you had that gut feeling, but it clashed with what you cognitively knew to be true in reality? Where does our conscience, or “sixth sense,” even come from? Many of us have gone with our gut when making major decisions; some of us swear by it, and some of us simply do not trust our instincts. This may also relate to who and what we say “yes" to; would you agree to something if your gut told you it was a bad idea?

Let's begin to break this down a little. I'll start with an extreme example in light of the Christmas season.

One of the wildest examples of someone saying yes and leaving themselves vulnerable to all manner of injury is when Mary the Mother of God agreed to bear His child after the angel Gabriel came to her to announce her conception of Jesus. To non-Catholics, this may sound utterly ludicrous. And it absolutely is. When we put this in historical context, Mary lived in a place and time when women were married in adolescence, virginity was a requirement in Jewish marriage, and the process of childbirth itself was a life-or-death ordeal for mother and child. So let's set the scene: a young girl, already engaged, suddenly sees a strange man in her room, probably emanating light and power. If she is smart, she is probably terrified and confused, but presumably by some sort of divine telepathy, she understands that this is a messenger from God (or maybe he just outright announces himself and we simply do not have the documentation). Young Mary is then told that she is now pregnant, even though she probably has never touched another man except to hug her father, and she will have a baby boy and name him Jesus. She doesn't even get to pick his name!

So those facts are stressful enough. But she agrees to it all without hesitation. She doesn’t ask to sleep on it, she doesn’t consult her mom, she just jumps in with both feet. What convinced her that this would be fine, that everything would turn out in her favor?

Spoiler alert: it did not turn out fine, from a mother's perspective. Her only child was an enemy of the state for the better part of three years and was tortured and killed publicly, left to die hanging by nails in his hands and feet to slowly suffocate and bleed to death in the hot sun.

If you have children, take a moment to envision that for your child. If you can’t stomach it, don’t feel bad, neither can I. It’s utterly horrific. The anguish and gut-wrenching heartbreak Mary felt might have been avoided if she had just said no to God's proposition. But she didn’t. She said yes.

Mary suffered as only a parent who had lost a child can suffer, but her reward was incomparable: she and her son were assumed body and soul into Heaven to be together forever. And what is more, this opened the doors for us to do the same. Although for mother and son, it was a painful sacrifice, the reward is eternal and infinite.

That seems worth it. But Mary could not possibly have known or comprehended any part of her future when she said yes to God as a young girl. There is just no way. Mary trusted her “gut.” The Bible implies that it was her faith in God that was her guide. I posit that her gut instinct and God's guidance were one and the same.