The Weight of My No

One Christmas, about two years into our marriage, my wife and I were helping my mother decorate her tree. Once the ornaments were up, one job remained: the topper.

I volunteered before either of them could reach for the ladder.

Somehow, my fear of heights had never come up.

My legs weakened with every rung. By the time I reached the top, I was sweating. I thought only I could feel them shaking. My wife could see them from the floor.

When I admitted I was afraid, she told me to come down and said we would find another way.

I kept going.

The ladder was steady. I could reach the topper without stretching. I was afraid, but I wasn’t unsafe. And I didn’t want either of them climbing when I could do it.

So I steadied myself and placed the topper.

The fear came down the ladder with me.

It just didn’t get to make the decision.

Years later, before I went onstage to preach, fear offered me another way down.

This time, coming down meant staying silent when I believed God had given me something to say.

I was still studying.

I had spent the week studying harder than I ever had for a college exam. I rehearsed. I edited the manuscript at night. I kept reaching for one more sentence, one more pass, one more reason to believe I wouldn’t freeze when it was time to speak.

The worst version in my head was specific. I would forget everything. I would have a panic attack in front of everyone watching. The silence would be unbearable. Then the bloggers who had criticized my family for years would turn my failure into another weapon. At least, that was the story I had already written for them.

I was trying to make embarrassment impossible for me and for the people I loved. That made the fear feel responsible, almost protective. It was still fear.

As a little boy, I sat in rooms with thousands of people and watched my parents minister. I was captivated. I also couldn’t imagine doing what they did.

They never asked me to match them. But other people had been listening for resemblance since I was a child, and eventually I started listening for it too.

Before God called me to help shepherd His people, I took real joy in telling people I wasn’t called to preach or pastor. I quit ministry school twice. I looked at people who seemed more gifted and more certain, then treated their conviction as proof that I didn’t belong there.

There was also freedom in not being so well known. Saying yes to a more visible calling meant surrendering some of my anonymity, and I wasn’t eager to lose it.

That instinct was already in me at six. There is footage of me noticing the camera and burrowing into my father’s jacket while the Holy Spirit moved through me.

The hardest part to admit is that I sometimes kept my distance from the Word because I was afraid of where getting closer to God might lead. He might give me something I felt responsible to say out loud.

I really did think God had called enough preachers in my family. I wasn’t joking.

By the time I was asked to preach, I had spent years answering to a verdict nobody had handed down. The bloggers were real. The ruling was mine. I had them compare me to people they already trusted, find me lacking, and publish my failure before I opened my mouth.

Nobody had heard me preach as a grown man yet. I was doing all of their talking for them.

I called that realism. It made staying still feel responsible, which was easier than admitting how afraid I was. I had planned for failure so thoroughly that I felt its consequences before I took the risk.

I hadn’t decided to preach because of a feeling. I had tested the direction through Scripture, prayer, and people who would have told me no. It held.

I was still afraid.

I cared about the message. I had spent the week praying for someone I could not name, someone I believed was close to giving up on themselves and on God. Fear kept pulling my attention back to what the room’s response might say about me.

I didn’t know whether the person I had prayed for would hear me or what they would do with the message. For years, my ministry had been helping the Word reach people from behind the platform. Now that I was the one speaking, I couldn’t let self-protection keep that message from reaching them.

I kept coming back to Hebrews 11:8 (ESV): Abraham “went out, not knowing where he was going.” I wanted to know how the room would receive me before I entered it.

When it was almost time, my wife, my mother-in-love, and our family friend Pastora Celma began to pray with me.

The Holy Spirit filled them as we prayed. I stopped cramming. I stopped reaching for another edit. I stopped trying to hold the moment together by myself.

The preparation mattered. I had done the work. What I couldn’t do was edit my way into control of the room.

During that prayer, I surrendered the outcome. The peace that came did not promise me a kind room; it released me from needing to know. I felt the Holy Spirit tell me I had prepared enough and that He could use more than what was on the page.

The fear left before I walked onstage. The anxiety that had followed me from those childhood rooms has not returned since. I know fear does not always leave after one prayer. I can only tell you what happened to mine.

The moment was bigger than me. If I stumbled, I would get back up and finish what I came to do. Not everybody would approve. I can embarrass myself without divine assistance. But I trusted that He would be with me while I delivered what He had given me.

God didn’t call me to embarrass me.

Once I was up there, I stopped speaking to the critics in my head.

I thanked the people who had prayed me to that moment. I told the room I wasn’t accustomed to the pulpit, that the notes in front of me were training wheels, and that I would rather they walked out remembering God than remembering me.

Over the course of the message, I kept returning to why I had come: somebody in that room was still sitting inside their worst day, and I had spent the week praying for them.

I couldn’t control what they did with it. My part was to deliver it.

I preached a message titled Unfinished Glory. In the passage I preached, the clay was marred and still in the Potter’s hands. He did not reach for cleaner material.

Getting to the pulpit did not make me finished. It made my unfinishedness visible.

Near the end, I told them I wasn’t pointing at the gate from across the room. I was standing in it with them.

Your fear may have nothing to do with a pulpit. But you may know what it is to live inside a failure that has not happened yet. I did. My fear was not proof that I was called, and it was not proof that I couldn’t answer. I started obeying while I was still afraid. The peace came later.

The response was unlike anything I had prepared myself for.

People kept naming the things I thought would count against me. They described the message as authentic. They noticed that I wasn’t trying to compete with anyone else’s style. One comment stayed with me: “Not performative, but sacredly surrendered.”

I knew what performance looked like. I had spent years shaping sacred moments for a screen. I had been afraid people would listen for how much I sounded like someone else. What this person heard was surrender.

Some people compared me anyway. They heard my mother’s tenderness, my father’s demeanor, or pieces of both. The difference was that comparison arrived after I had obeyed. It could describe what they heard. It could no longer decide whether they heard me at all.

I wasn’t called because I’m such a talented speaker. My heart is for God, and I believed He had placed a message in my care. So I answered.

The parts I had treated as disqualifying were the parts people recognized as honest. God used me while I was still learning.

The response encouraged me. I won’t pretend it didn’t. But the encouragement came after I stood up. A warm response was a gift. I wasn’t bargaining for a kind audience.

A little over two weeks later, I tried to explain what had changed. I said I had not realized the weight of my no while I was walking in it. No had become comfortable. I had learned how to fall asleep with it.

I don’t know where every yes will take me. I know I don’t want fear answering for me again.