when the answer is no
Oh! Riley says, sitting up straight, this a surprised, delighted sound bubbling up from her heart, an awareness awakening her, if temporarily, from a tired after work descent, her spine having already begun its curl toward sleep. “I heard back about my requests.”
Keep awake, Christ urged repeatedly, because it takes intentionality to disengage from the numbing tingle of our ordinary crumbling to plugin, instead, to wonder, and I am wondering how many times I miss noting the hearing back about my own prayerful petitions.
But Riley isn’t really talking about prayers right now. She means her PTO requests, because where Riley works, additional days off, requested days, are always paid time off, which she submits in advance for approval via an online portal. A few weeks ago, she had applied to take Thanksgiving holidays off to spend time with her fiancé, Josh, and his family, as well as requesting a few days in December for an extended family Christmas celebration, and she had been waiting to hear back from her manager.
It’s me over in my corner of the sofa thinking about prayer as I watch her awaken with anticipation over answers, and I’m thinking, who waits, always looking, like she has for this response? Every day, slumped in her favorite chair at the bar after work, eating a little dinner, she’s been tapping on her phone, looking, always looking for answers.
I am suddenly aware that I am often too preoccupied to be so watchful.
“You did? What did your manager say?”
Now the watchful witness of one awakens all of us to anticipation. Kevin and I wait, listening, as Riley clicks through to her messages.
“Umm, let’s see,” she says, in that voice she uses for contemplativeness when she knows she’s being observed. “Well, it says that some of my requested PTO has been approved, and some of it has been denied.”
“Okay,” I say, still waiting, already figuring it’s Thanksgiving they couldn’t give her. Unfortunately, sickness doesn’t take breaks for the holidays, and healers of every kind must stand in the gap for the afflicted, and even though Riley delivers meals, we think of her also as a carrier of God’s healing love into hospital rooms.
“Umm,” Her voice wavers, “it says my request for Thanksgiving has been denied,” she says. “I didn’t get it. That request has a red ‘x’ beside it.” Her eyes glisten. “But I did get the December dates, though. There’s a green check beside those anyway.”
She is trying, like we do, to find a reason, the way, for being thankful, but it’s hard to be thankful for disappointing answers, for answers we don’t have the capacity even to understand. Her request came from such a good place, so why the no? At least I imagine that’s what she wonders, but she doesn’t say, just bends closer to the computer screen, as if a change in proximity might suddenly remove that offensive ‘x’ beside her petition.
Briefly, I wonder if Riley would have found this easier to accept if they had substituted a happier symbol for that red ‘x’ I know Riley reads as wrong, you are wrong, a smiley face, say, or a fall leaf.
It’s intrinsically human to receive a no as an offense, or maybe some kind of assessment gone wrong, and in our culture, disapproval does carry that awful personal connotation, along with words like rejected and denied, and these are the words we use to describe negative responses. Meanwhile, yes amounts to affirmation and acceptance. When we look for answers, admittedly, the answer we’re really looking for is yes, and maybe it’s only that the natural longing for the ultimate yes of every promise in Christ has become, in a disfigured world, the childish belief that affirming me and saying yes to me are the same thing. But parents know: love’s answer isn’t always yes. And parents know: children don’t always understand why the most loving answer can sometimes be no.
We have childlike ways and childish ways, and in each of us, somewhere, lives a child sometimes distraught, incredulous, and feeling unloved because she didn’t get her way.
Riley looks up at me again, her eyes full brimming, and her voice trembles like an earthquake as she repeats, “They said my request for PTO for Thanksgiving is denied.”
“Oh, listen, it’s okay,” I say, although I know she does not agree, that for her, it’s not okay. Remembering wisdom I’ve heard about not minimizing feelings, I regroup. “I know this feels very hard, and I’m sorry for that,” I tell her, rising to go stand beside her, to place a reassuring hand on her back. “I know you’re sad to miss Thanksgiving with Josh’s family. But we’ll be here for you, and Zoe will be home, and I will make some of your favorite foods to eat. There will still be good things.”
In and around the no, the not yet, the how-could-it-not-be, there are always still good things.
I turn to explaining, trying to help her understand how-in-the-world a no could come to shatter something good, something having to do with thanksgiving, how she can offer thanks, even now, in the giving.
“I’m sure that your manager just already approved all the requests he could for PTO over Thanksgiving. Just about everybody wants to take off to feast with their family for the holiday, and maybe you just asked later than a lot of other people. For the future, we could always send an email and ask what a good time would be to request the days, to have a chance of getting them off.”
“Yes,” she’s nodding, agreeing and reaching for hope, lifting her hand to punctuate the air with her finger as she speaks, “because I’m new to this PTO over the holidays thing.”
“You are, and we’re figuring it out together, aren’t we?” My hand, still resting steady-flat against her back.
“You could always ask your manager yourself,” Kevin says, interjecting. “When you see him at work. Just ask him how early you can request PTO for the holidays.”
“Mmmhmm,” Riley says, which is usually her agreeable way of kindly dismissing an idea, and I realize I can count on my hands the number of times I remember hearing her say no to someone else. She wipes her eyes carefully with a folded napkin, blotting slowly, deliberately, with that perfect white rectangle of a thing I watched her crease into a knife edge fold, her brassy hair swinging off her shoulders as she tilts her head.
Riley lives so deliberately, so diligently, all the time, as if she does not know any other way to go about living, practicing whatever definition of perfection she’s perfected with such perfect precision that she always feels blown away when things don’t turn out right. Maybe she’s even more this way because of her challenges and because of the social awareness that gives her both an important level of compassion for others and a bewilderment about her own eccentricities, but admittedly, I believe her buy-in to the idea that doing things right makes things go my way is one we all share to some degree, even if, on the surface of things, we should know better.
“Mom, I heard you say that you would help me email my manager about when to request PTO, because my request for PTO for Thanksgiving was denied,” she says, reiterating, as she puts aside her napkin and presses it flat with her hand, reiterating like she’s chasing the thought she does not want to accept, reaching, but not quite catching it by the tail.
Her expression, her tone, says, I do not have words for such a thing; I do not know how to ask, and can’t I just rely on you, and Kevin and I share a glance, hearing what she does not say, drawn to and compassionate about her feelings, each of us remembering times so steeped in sadness and confusion we did not have words with which to ask, when we could no longer shape our needs into prayers, when we relied upon the promise that the Holy Spirit intercedes for us.
“You’re her intercessor,” Kevin says simply, and we share a smile, knowing that we have long served this way, as intercessors and advocates for our language-challenged children.
The writer of the book of Hebrews wrote that Jesus is able to save to the uttermost because He lives to intercede for us, and it amazes me to note that the Greek word there translated intercede, entugchano, meaning literally to obtain by hitting the mark actually stands as the antonym to the Greek word translated to sin, that is harmartia, or to miss the mark, which is to say that Christ can by His own accomplishment—and does–obtain for me the ultimate yes that I could never obtain on my own. I am an archer continually missing the center of the target, and He is the one who shoots in my stead and never misses. So, I come to Him with confidence when I have no words to left to pray and no case to make for myself, knowing He is the only winning argument for me. I don’t even need the right words, because I have Him.
Riley looks at me, waiting, knowing I’ll have words enough at least to help her ask her questions. “Because I’m new to this,” she says again, “and my request for PTO at Thanksgiving was denied.” She draws quick hands below her eyes, catching her own tears with her fingers.
And the question I keep hearing in my own heart is only, will you have courage like this to keep asking, to keep watching, wide-awake for an answer, when the answer you hear is no? Because that’s when persistence in prayer becomes hard, even uncomfortable.
“Of course I’ll help you,” I say, wrapping my arms now around Riley’s shoulders, pressing against her, cheek to cheek. Of course I will. In fact, I live to do that.
