A couple of years ago we surveyed thousands of summer campers and asked them what new activity they wanted at camp. Their overwhelming response? Three things: #1. Roller coasters, #2. Go-carts, and #3. Put-put Golf.
Seriously? Mini golf? I mean, what the heck are kids thinking?
They don’t want to play put put golf. It’s the stupidest game ever (I mean next to real golf). No way.
And go-carts, while they’re fun for the first five minutes, are expensive. For real. I priced it out. About a million bucks to build the track, buy the cars, and get it going. Not a chance. There’s lots of other things I’d rather spend a million bucks on.
Roller coasters aren’t bad I guess. I mean they’ve done well for Six Flags and Cedar Pointe. But this is camp. We’re going to do something campy. No roller coasters.
And I guess that’s how it goes. We ask them for ideas, inspire them to dream, tell them Jesus wants to do something amazing through them… and then tell them no way. It costs too much. It’s too hard. It’s not fun for me. I’m busy. I’m tired. Maybe next year.
(To be fair, this is an exaggeration of my personal emotional response, not our official response. We did land on an awesome new activity to build that kids are going to love…)
Stop. Think.
Think about your family. If you’re married or have kids, or live in your dad’s basement, think about the one thing, if I asked any them, what one thing would they appreciate the most if you would do it this week? What is it? 15 seconds. Go.
Ok, if you work with kids, next think about them. Think about the kids in your youth group, Sunday school class, classroom… What was the most audacious thing they’ve asked of you recently? 15 seconds. Go.
What’s the harm?
What would be the harm in saying yes to those things? Saying yes to your kids, or your spouse, or you’re the children or youth you serve.
Here’s the reality, in the early 1980’s, Nancy Reagan taught us to say no to drugs.
And, a few years later we get this from Steve Jobs.
And now we have guys like Michael Hyatt telling us as pastors and leaders that we need to get better at saying no.
“I have now resolved to say no to everything unless there is a really, really compelling reason to say yes. In other words, I have switched my default response from yes to no.”
And I’m with you. There’s a lot of crappy stuff on my schedule. And sometimes facebook and my blog statistics are like crack to me… and I know I need to say no to some things.
But here’s my hypothesis: the bigger problem for most of us isn’t that we don’t know how to say no to crap. It’s that no one has ever taught us how to recognize and say yes to awesome stuff.
A really, really compelling reason.
The statistics all suggest that kids hear the word no somewhere between 10 and 100 times more often than they hear the word yes. A toddler hears no something like 400 times a day. A teenager will hear the word no more like 148,000 times while they’re in school.
Most of the kids around you are just desperate for someone to see something good in them, to see value in their idea, to spend time with them, to take a risk on them, to take a risk with them. They’re desperate for someone to say yes.
And that’s a really, really compelling reason to say yes.