There’s a little picture going around Facebook that says, “When someone yells stop; I don't know if it's in the name of love, it's hammer time, or if I should collaborate and listen.” The three of those being references to songs, of course, with a “stop” in them. The first, obviously is the Supremes “Stop in the name of love”…although folks in their twenties and younger might not even know who the Supremes are (it’s a pizza, right?). The second, almost as obviously, is from the song “U Can’t Touch This” by MC Hammer (at the time anyway, later he was just Hammer, and later still he was a self-parodied clown in a SuperBowl Ad)…although folks in their twenties or younger, or in their fifties or older might not know who HE is regardless of what he calls himself. And the last was from the song “Ice Ice Baby” by Vanilla Ice…and he’s pretty irrelevant regardless of how old you are, other than knowing that he straight stole the bass groove from the Queen song “Pressure” no matter how many times he’s said that he didn’t.
But back to my point, the word “stop” is a forceful, impactful little word. Like a pistol firing or a loud hand clap, it’s a short, to-the-point word. Someone yells “stop” and kids immediately know to not run out into the street or touch the stove, bad guys know the cops are about to start shooting at them, people reading telegraphs know that they’ve gotten to the end of a sentence (stop), and you know that you should immediately cease and desist whatever it is you’re doing or about to do. Or that it’s Hammer Time, I guess (Stop! Hammer Time). C’mon, those of you that know the song have been thinking it anyway, haven’t you?
But every now and then, it’s something we need to tell ourselves. We over-commit. We tell everyone that we can “take care of that” for them, and for them, and for them, and eventually you’ve told everyone you know that you can be there at 12:30 on Saturday as soon as you finish helping everyone else on the list – and you’ve essentially booked that one Saturday afternoon from 12:30 until 2:45 the following Thursday. We can’t be everything to everyone. Sometimes, we have to tell someone “I’m sorry, I can’t”. And before you can tell someone else “no”, you have to tell yourself “stop”. (Especially if your over-committing is a way to hide from some larger issue that you don’t feel like dealing with.)
It’s great to give all you have to help others. It’s great to be someone that people can rely on when they need help. It’s great to be the guy at work that knows a lot about a lot. To be the one that everyone calls to ask questions about things that are well out of your supposed “job description”. But sometimes you get so far outside your job description that you’ve blurred the lines as to what those actually are, and your free advise turns into expected service. And sometimes we’re so caught up in helping other people that we’ve forgotten to help our own families. We walk 25 miles…through the snow…uphill both ways…barefoot no less to help the new family at church move into their house, or help work in the church garden, or volunteer at the senior centers or the homeless shelters. And then you’re too tired to help your wife fold towels. Or spend quality time with your kids. Or to get up and go to church on Sunday morning. Or to study your Bible on a Saturday afternoon. It’s not so great to be the person that people say “well he said he’d be here, but who knows when he’ll actually get here.” Because you’ve gotten to where you’re always willing to help everyone, but you’ve left yourself no time to actually help MOST of the people you’ve said you’d help. And worse still to be the one that constantly neglects your family because you’re overcommitted to everyone else.
Although, to be fair, sometimes when you commit to help, those you’ve committed to help have tighter time frames than you’d been led to believe. You show up to help, and they’re gone because “we’ll be here around 3:00” meant “I’m not waiting a minute later than 3:00.” And sometimes when people come to you for help, it’s a situation where they shouldn’t be coming to you in the first place. You might be the easy stop. The quick stop. But you’re not the right stop. And you’re actually the harder stop to get to. Sometimes you’re the “I’ll walk around the corner, up two flights of stairs, knock the secret knock, do the secret handshake, and interrupt what they’re doing to ask my question” option. And you know what? It’s not wrong to say to that person “I don’t know, you’ll need to go ask this other person. They’ll know the answer you need.” They might not want to ask that other person their question, but that doesn’t make you a bad person for not knowing the answer or not going to track it down for them. Albert Einstein supposedly said that he never memorized something that he could easily look up. (And he might have actually said that, but I didn’t feel like looking it up! HaHa!) And that seems pretty smart to me…and fairly applicable to this devotional. Why trying to come up with an answer on everything, when the easiest solution is to just point them to the right person, so they can go ask the question themselves…cut out the middle man, so to speak. And that’s ok, too. Whether or not they want to ask the right person is on them.
Jesus said to “let your yes be yes, and your no be no”…but first, to yourself let your stop be stop. And then let your yes be yes, and your no be no. Because once you’ve told yourself to stop telling everyone that you can do everything for them, you can actually be useful to the people you’re left helping. Jesus was completely and fully about helping people. We read time after time of his reaching out to those that needed him. And yet we read on several occasions where he went off by himself to pray. If we get so busy in the helping that we neglect our own spiritual nourishment, then we end up helping no one, not even ourselves. On the seventh day, God rested. He didn’t need rest any more than Jesus needed to be baptized. But we’re thick-headed, “stiff-necked people” (just like they were called in Exodus), and God knows that we need visual aids. Listen for the Whisper that tells you that you need to slow down. And that sometimes you need to just stop. Take a deep breath. Pray. And learn to say, “I can’t today, but I’ll be glad to help when I can”.
~Dwayne
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