Berita NECF Newletters

Women to Women Issue 69

Description: Saying No - Wanting to sort out clutter at year end? Seeking to set goals in place? Here’s timely advice as we learn that it all begins with...
By Miriam Adeney

Kingdom Priorities

Try this:  Lay out a large sheet of butcher paper or construction paper, take up a few coloured pens, and draw a picture of your life (as you’d like it to be) five years from now.  Stick figures are fine: this is for your eyes only.  Cover as many aspects of your life as you can: friends and family, career, intellectual growth, finances, service activities, hobbies and skills, fun flings.  Include your wildest dreams.  This exercise will help you make contact with some of your unconscious hopes.

From this picture select a list of goals to work toward this year.  You might break some of these down into steps, with deadlines.  For example, ‘I will greet one stranger and try to start a conversation every week, starting this week.’

Before you get too committed though, you need to step back and ask yourself: Are these worthy goals?  I use two tools here, one for critiquing my goals, and one for arranging them in a hierarchy according to importance.

To critique my intended activities I ask these questions:

How important is it?  How much power does it have to affect the world?

How needy is it?

Can or will anyone else do it, or am I uniquely fitted to do it by gifts or by being on the spot?

Is it new?  Does it break ground? Or is it something I have done before? Will I grow?

Is this an obligation because of loyalty to an institution? (Like wiping the kitchen table?!)

What is the financial compensation?
Are my time and energy already committed?

Next I arrange my goals in order of importance.  A year ago, using the criteria above, I divided my current projects into three lists:

  1. Top priority
  2. Fairly important
  3. Interesting but not crucial

To my surprise, most of my planned activities fell into lists 2 and 3.  In list 1 were specific needs in my relationship with God, specific and relational needs of my children and my husband, needy friends outside my comfortable network, and creative writing that nobody was urging me to do.  These lists helped me discover where I had priorities without plans.  Now, one year later, I can thank these lists for pushing me to take specific steps in priority areas that I would have let slip by otherwise.

For you, kingdom priorities might mean saying no to talking on the telephone so much.  Or saying no to well-established committees in order to serve on other more needy committees.  Saying no to certain kinds of reading to do other, more crucial reading.

Saying no to thinking so much about how you feel or the way you look – saying no to your ‘pity parties.’  Kingdom priorities might mean monitoring your imagination – “casting down imaginations, and every high thing that exalteth itself…and bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ” (2 Cor. 10:5 KJV).

It might mean limiting the time you spend thinking about fashion, shopping, romance, eating out, backpacking, gardening, skiing, soap operas, novels, gossip, or whatever catches your imagination, in order consciously to focus a certain amount of your thoughts on people’s need for Jesus, on world hunger, on nuclear weapon dangers, on teenage mothers.

Kingdom priorities might mean saying no to spending so much time with certain friends in order to spend time with other friends who need you more.

Or limiting your mindless conversations, in order consciously to make your conversations channels of grace.

There’s a time for frivolous activities.  They shouldn’t be scratched out of your agenda because they’re ‘not important.’  We need to dare to act out some of our silly dreams.  On the other hand, our dreams deserve some scrutiny.  Some will prove to be hollow.  Others will be seen to be redundant.  When I first drew a picture of Miriam-five-years-from-now, I included a sketch of myself travelling in Africa.

Later, when I looked at my goals in light of God’s kingdom, realising that he has given me a good deal of ministry in Asia and Latin America, I saw that it’s probably not necessary for me to go to Africa too.  Struggling toward that is probably just greed.  When I realised that, I was able to loosen my grasp on that goal.  If God sends me to Africa, well and good.  If not, that’s one thing I probably don’t need.  Nor does God’s world.

So make time to dream without inhibitions.  Then, later, critique these dreams.

Here are a few questions:

What will I do this week that I haven’t done before?
Who do I want to relate to this week?
What am I struggling with?
What am I hoping for?
What am I learning?

On weeks when I need a pep talk, I use these.  Scanning the week ahead, I ask myself these questions before I plan my schedule.  Then at the end of the week I review what happened in relation to these guidelines.  This pushes me to take initiative in areas that I would let slide otherwise.  For example, I may call a rarely-seen friend and say, “Can we get together?  While setting up my priorities for this week I discovered that you are a luxury I’d like to treat myself to.”

Beyond this, if you’re committing yourself to a lonely, unusual, or difficult activity, a list of specific motivators may help.  Writing is one of my priorities.  But when I get writer’s block I lose my nerve and want to withdraw into my shell.  To attack that block, I remind myself of these motivations:

Personal call: A conviction that God wants me to write

Past use: People have been helped by my writing.

Present use: When I get discouraged about what I’m working on now, I remember that when I speak on this material people are helped. So it must be written.

World need: Beyond individuals, the hurting world needs my vision and my creatvity expressed.

Models: Isaiah, Catherine Booth, and certain contemporary friends have spent long, lonely, late nights struggling to find the right words. I’m not alone.  In their company – even across thousands of miles, or across centuries – I can do it too.

Daily goals: “How do you manage to keep going when writer’s block hits?” Contemporary Christian writer Philip Yancey was asked that question recently. He answered, “Rigid discipline.  And then after a few days I get so exasperated with myself that the block disappears.”

Public accountability: I seek assignments.  I also commit myself to show a friend a certain amount of work by a certain date.

Try undergirding yourself with a similar list of motivators as ‘expect great things from God, and attempt great things for God.’

In the area of housework and general life maintenance, we can always find simpler strategies.  Most of these are small no’s that can free us up to say yes to bigger challenges.

‘NO’ Is a Knife
Over my desk hangs a motto: “Writing is planned neglect.”  Recently I read a related statement: “Only the unemployed can run for President.”  Only those who turn down standard activities will have the time and energy to pour into priority affairs.

Saying No
In the final analysis, all significant living is planned neglect.  Ultimately, only a few things can be priorities.  It is good to put on leotards, to stretch and to kick, for example. Bodily exercise profits a little.  But it is not only good, it is essential to follow Isaiah’s advice regarding inner as well as outer discipline.  ‘Awake, awake!  Put on your strength…put on your beautiful garments…’ (Isaiah 52:1 NKJV).

A woman’s normal life is flooded with distractions, as Anne Morrow Lindbergh observed.  What a very hard struggle it is to be a responsible person, as Catherine Booth noted.

Although, or rather, because both of these women knew well how to say no, both are remembered for their positive gifts to the world.

No is a knife word.  We cringe from its sharpness.  We fear cutting away alternate possibilities.  We fear letting go.  Yet we need it.  Let’s remember, there is no fear in God’s love (1 John 4:18).  And God’s love is the context within which we make choices.  Why do we say no?  In order to say yes to what really matters.


Taken from A Time for Risking, Priorities for Women by Miriam Adeney Regent College Publishing, Canada, 2001.  Used with permission.



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