THE PROCESS OF YES
I think at some point I stopped wanting something. At least something big, maybe even something as necessary as breath.
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It’s not so much a question of if all the important details will align.
It’s an ebbing and flowing confidence that I will be here to see a big dream through.
To want something takes an abundance of hope. Hope takes courage in large supply.
When I started this blog, I was tucked into my sunshine-bathed Napa studio, surrounded by an endless provision of kale and otherworldly squash. Before the diagnosis that plowed through this serenity like an earthmover upending every seedling in site, I would walk out the French doors, down the pebbled pathway leading through the garden with this incessant refrain running through my mind, “I’m so tired.” Even though I had so many exciting things ahead.
If I had listened just a little more intently to my body’s whispers, I might have avoided what came next. Yet, didn’t what came next ultimately become the singular most important contribution I would give to the world?—
To not only navigate the hard moment but harness it for extraordinary good.
To make something enduring and exquisite of the most difficult of what we go through.
Summing it up in the simplest terms,
There is no stopping what God intends for you.
If His “yes” were a singular line drawn on paper it would be the opposite of short and straight. I have seen it like the sharpened pencil set down firmly, meandering and turning in unexpected ways.
We misunderstand that the answers to our petitions must come as definitively as they are exclaimed. Yet we are bent to change our mind; The things we wanted yesterday, or even from morning to tonight, are likely to shift and rearrange.
The process of yes gives us time. Time to imagine. Time to become. Time to take in all the good and hard of being alive and then to sift out what we ultimately value and desire.
To read every one of my Journal entries, you must click “older posts…” eleven times. This, my love of writing, has become a collection of hopes and dreams, where what you imagine for yourself intersects with mine.
Not in one of these stories do I read “no” or “never.” Instead, I see the pencil gliding and swirling, erasing and punctuating until at last the “yes” appears as if at the end of a sentence, as a bold and definitive exclamation mark.
These stories fold one into the other—fresh and repetitive, rough and unassumingly real.
They are a living proof that the process of yes is an unfolding, a revelation, a cure.
If there is an overarching lesson it is this:
Rushing the “yes” leads to compromise.
Shall we, then, avoid editing our own story, removing all the tender and juicy lines—
the ones that make us gasp, and tear, and hold onto one another through the night?
I think God has a process, a checks-and-balances of what is said and what is meant. He sees through the lens of a grander outcome, taking into consideration the situation from every side. His is a “yes” of interlocking pieces, of his, and hers, and ours intertwined.
The Process of “yes” in its most heavenly form is made up of both hard and beautiful sides. And I will savor both for a lifetime.
I have decided that all of what is ahead, is for me. The opposite of hostile. The antonym of against—Janene Kraft, Sanctuary Living
NOTES:
We are selling our home, the one we’ve poured ourselves into—through moving states and cancer therapies, and the tragic loss of two enormous Danes. “Why” is the question from the outside that makes its way forward, even if we find it nestled between more diplomatic lines. My answer is something between a giggle and a sigh—
Giggle, because I trust His plan for us above what we can imagine for ourselves.
Sigh, because our seemingly unconventional way of living is often somewhat difficult to explain.
The Process of Yes was written as a response to a new dream we have in store—
One that requires a series of hurdles that are humanly arduous, but divinely intended.
Each hurdle made over is an indication that God is running right alongside.
In fact, said more accurately, He’s already at the finish line.
Refer to the pencil mark on paper, the one that sometimes meanders in surprising ways?
Ron and I feel Him “in this,” no matter the outcome. And if it is to be, you can be certain there will be a story to tell. One that puts the Orchestrator of everything front and center.
Much Love,
jk
ABOUT THE IMAGE:
Old buildings. Old soul. I think we are kindred spirits, them and I. This image was taken in an ancient church. I thought it quite eerie at the time. Now, it seems a foreshadowing of what’s to come…and that makes it even more special. I love how the architecture draws you in, how the soft light leads you through. This is what The Process of Yes looks like in my mind’s eye.