Getting to Yes in Prayer

Photo by Akira Hojo on Unsplash

I’ve been considering one-word prayers lately, writing about them, as in this piece I wrote for Ekstasis magazine (https://tinyurl.com/ywpvjh8m). I’m exploring how short, simple words like Thanks or Help make an engaging basis for prayer.

A friend suggested another: Yes.

At first, I wasn’t quite sure that that three-letter word warranted much of a place in my everyday praying. For one thing, I wondered if the word felt too, well, tidy.

And to be sure, it may come as one of our more difficult prayers to get to, especially when God seems to present us with something hard. Some days our reply will be more like a reluctant Okay than an exuberant Sure. Saying Yes may represent an aspiration more than an actuality.

Still, I began experimenting. 

I soon realized I very much like in the word: Yes feels more active than some prayers of acceptance. I sometimes wonder if people too quickly mouth “Your will be done” when they converse with God, with almost the feel of Why bother to ask? It feels more like resignation than genuine conversation. To say Yes to God goes beyond a half-hearted Whatever.

And I see great precedent in the Bible for this prayer, challenging or not. For one thing, the apostle Paul reminds us how in Jesus “every one of God’s promises is a ‘Yes.’” What an awe-inspiring picture! But then we have our part to play, for Paul goes on to say, “For this reason it is through him that we say the ‘Amen,’ to the glory of God.” Amen’s “so-be-it” is a kind of yes, bringing affirmation to the end of our beseeching.

So I’m experimenting with saying it in the mornings. I try to be willing to be used, to reply to God, as best as I can muster, “I want your good purposes to continue—in and through me.” That’s a kind of yes. Tiny though it is, it begins to seem mighty.

And because I like to go beyond mere vocabulary to a gesture or posture, I think of how opening our hands might prove a way to embody our Yes, to unclasp that in us which is closed off or grasping: “Whenever you pray,” wrote Henri Nouwen, “you profess that you are not God and that you wouldn’t want to be, that you haven’t reached your goal yet … that you must constantly stretch out your hands and wait again for the gift which gives new life.”

I think that little word might help us become more like Isaiah, who when called by God responded: “Here am I.” And this is what we see in the picture of young Mary, when hearing news of how she had been called to bear the Son of God: “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.”

What a simple, glorious Yes! I get it now: how that little world carries untold and immeasurable meaning—for us and for how God waits to enlist us.