Say Yes!
Life After the Dream
A Message from Mark Taylor, Minister of Faith Development
mtaylor@fccedmond.org 405.341.3544
What do you do when life doesn't turn out the way you hoped? When a plan you built your identity around falls apart? When the voice in your head keeps telling you you're too far gone and nothing is ever going to change?
That voice has a name in Scott Erickson's book Say Yes: the Voice of Giving Up. Erickson has had his own long midnight conversations with it, wrestling with professional burnout and clinical depression, and he knows how loud that voice can get. But he's also discovered that our deepest pain can become something restorative: a chance to reawaken the desires we've buried, loosen the grip of our greatest fears, and name the destructive stories that have been holding us back. This four-week series spends time with that voice, alongside the story of Moses, to ask a better question than the one it keeps asking us.
Moses's story has a lot of dreams that don't turn out. His mother makes a desperate choice. Moses fails publicly, in front of his own people, and spends forty years running from it. His first response to God's call is a list of every reason he's the wrong person for the job. God doesn't argue with him, instead he give him Aaron, and the plan moves forward anyway.
Here's what we hope this series gives you:
Solidarity. You're not the only one carrying something that didn't go the way you hoped or planned. This series makes room to say that out loud.
A name for the voice holding you back. Once you can name a limiting story, you can start to loosen its grip.
A faith with room for mystery. You don't need a tidy resolution to keep believing. Sometimes faith lives in the complexity of an unresolved question.
Practices for staying in it. Real, usable ways to keep saying yes to your own life, one day at a time.
This series has something for you. Maybe you're just starting out on your own, still working out what you believe. Maybe you're deep in the middle of it, raising kids and building a career and wondering if any of it adds up to something. Or maybe you've lived long enough to watch your own kids and grandkids carry dreams that didn't go the way anyone hoped. This series holds space for all of it.
Over these four weeks, we will sit with grief, failure, comparison, and the daily discipline of showing up anyway, discovering how each are less dead ends than doorways.
All three of our ministers will take turns in the pulpit, each bringing their own voice to Moses’s path. Come Say Yes with us, Sundays at 9 AM and 11 AM through August 9.