Christians are commanded by Christ to “love one another.” It’s a wonderful sentiment. But what does that look like in practice? If there are many people around us who need so many different things, how can we put love into action for each of them?
New York Times best-selling author Lysa TerKeurst tells Guideposts.org, simply: you can’t. “We all only have 168 hours a week.” If anyone knows about incredible demands on time, it’s TerKeurst. She’s the Proverbs 31 Ministries president, a speaker, a wife and a mother of five, among many other things. Still, God has some very specific God-honoring things that He wants each of us to do with the hours He gives us.
In her latest book, The Best Yes, TerKeurst offers advice on how to discover what those specific things are, to ensure we’re giving our very best to God, to each other and to ourselves. Her goal is to move us away from saying “yes” to every nice opportunity and every good request that comes our way to instead saying our best yes.
TerKeurst walks us through this process by helping us break down sinful roadblocks we may have constructed for ourselves, like needing to be liked by everyone. We shouldn’t confuse God’s command to love with our own “disease to please,” as TerKeurst calls it. Instead, TerKeurst starts every morning with this simple prayer: “Lord, unrush me.”
When we slow down and start paying attention to the people around us, the problems right in our faces, we can start to see God’s will for our lives more clearly.
“When I pray, ‘Lord, unrush me,’ it really means, ‘Lord, unrush my perspective, so I can do for one what I wish to do for all,” she says.
“While we’re trying to look for this big, overarching will of God, I think God just wants us to pay attention. If our perspective is unrushed, that means God can point to someone across the room and say ‘Walk across the room and spend 5 minutes with that person, giving them encouragement. That is My will for you today.’ In order to see those kinds of opportunities, we have to have an unrushed perspective.”
To help put the lessons from the book into practice, TerKeurst has an interactive website, TheBestYes.com, where readers can use her Time Assessment Tool to reprioritize their lives and sign up for daily email challenges to help them stay focused. She says about these book companion features, “I don’t want people just reading the ‘menu;’ I want people applying this information so that they digest the information and make it part of who they are and how they live. The digestion process requires tools that help people apply lessons to their life.”
And once we all start to understand the power and significance of our best yes, we will not only have better lives and well-managed schedules, we will also have better relationships. Our loved ones will no longer resent us—and we won’t resent them—when we say or hear the word “no.” We’ll understand that God has another way for this need to be met and will respect and love each other better by accepting and embracing “no.”
But the greatest thing about this book is that just purchasing it will be a “best yes”. All proceeds from the book will go towards ministries around the world that are in need. In China, TerKeurst tells Guideposts.org, there are 100 million Christians in the underground church movement but only 1 pastor for every 60,000. These ministries were in desperate need of quality Christian teaching materials translated into the several unique languages of believers and proceeds from The Best Yes were able to pay the full cost to translate all the materials these underground churches needed.
“I just trusted that the Lord would show us different initiatives around the world that needed to be blessed—and He has!”
There is no peace like the peace an unrushed life brings with it, and no joy like the joy of knowing you’re walking in God’s plan for your life. Using TerKeurst’s advice to slow down, be still and pay attention, you can start being intentional with your time and giving the world your best yes.
