10 Prayers You Can’t Live Without: Pray Yes

Rick Hamlin explores the importance of being prepared to say “Yes, and…” when we pray.


Hi. It’s Rick Hamlin. “10 Prayers You Can’t Live Without.” 

[MUSIC PLAYING] 

Here is the last prayer, which I call “yes, and.” And you might wonder why I’m holding a yogurt cup in my hand. What’s yogurt cup got to do with prayer? 

Well, first, the idea of “yes, and”– my son’s graduation. The speaker was Tina Fey, and she was talking about how in improvisational theater, when someone gives you something, you take it. You don’t disagree with it. When someone says to you, my father always loved the way you danced, you don’t say, I don’t dance. You go, yes, and we had such a good time, and when we danced at that party. 

So, so much of what life throws at us, we could say no. Or sometimes, in prayer, we can say “yes, and.” Here comes the yogurt cup. 

My friend, Elizabeth Sherrill, was at home. She was typing. She was working. She looked out the window, and there was a skunk with a yogurt cup caught on its nose. She called the Humane Society. She called animal rescue. They couldn’t get there in time. They sent her to somebody else. 

She thought, uh-oh. She went outside and found that skunk with the yogurt cup stuck on its nose. She leaned forward, she grabbed it, and pulled it off. The skunk looked at her, she looked at the skunk, and the skunk ran away. 

Sometimes the answer to prayer is you. Sometimes a need that needs to be done is you. The yogurt cup, the skunk. Sometimes a prayer is doing. Not just saying, but doing. Like a yogurt cup off of a skunk. “Yes, and.” 

[MUSIC PLAYING] 


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