And then there was Sunday morning after a week of watery, fading days.  After watching people I have journeyed with wrestle and lose ground with themselves, after black continued to gray.  After pictures of this country's history and past were plastered everywhere, aligning past grievances with the word no and after I sat and mulled over what the absence of no continues to mean for the children I tend and the family I was born into and the community I love fiercely and The Church.  What does taking that word away mean for His Bride?

As much as I love being a yes person, I respect the absence of that no word.  I'm watching it retreat in the education field, I'm seeing it leave the parenting world, the legal world, the economic world, and now the Church is in danger of losing this small, steady, power word.

I'm in a season of no.  Of feeling how unfair it seems.  How powerless and not right and rubbed raw no can leave you tears are just sitting in my eyes, and they catch over small, invisible things and my throat has burned for days.  But when I can manage to, when I can pull myself out of my wallowing and self awareness (what an acceptable phrase), I remember there are people world over who face no on a much broader scale, I remember I have lived among them and my next memory is always this: their joy.

No is being rewritten as we speak.  Its definition is restructured with every article, every meme, every argument you read.  Most words are.  This is the danger of our age-- our flamboyant use of language and its twisting, a twisting that started in a garden at the beginning of a world did He really mean not to when He said that?  This makes me more nervous than anything.  We are over here reinterpreting words spoken by the God who fashioned language.  We are even more bold.  We have His Book in one hand and our humanity in the other and soon we will have written a completely new book.

And so there was Sunday morning and I could only sway to the music, bow my head to a God who deserves better than me.  That's the equalizer isn't it.  There was my honest prayer I don't like some of the things written in The Book.  I don't know how to swallow them and smile with that same mouth at my friends who believe they were created different than I.  I bowed my head to a God who deserves better than me but who wants me all the same.  Bowed my head while pastor declared that we don't have a corner on the thoughts of God, no one does.  And I prayed for the strength it takes to hold fast to no in a world running from it.