Getting Through “No”
“Moses with the Tablets of the Law,” by Guido Reni, 1624
The other day, I found myself trying to explain a most difficult part of love to my almost 7-year-old son.
“Mom, I need you to get dad’s axe down for me so I can cut down a tree in the back yard to build a pirate ship!” he said.
One thing I love about my almost 7-year-old son is that his dreams materialize through his hands. When he wants something, he makes it—his preferred form of play is creating structures, vehicles, weapons, practical objects. His room is littered with paper ships and Lego vehicles, boxboard swords, cardboard-bound journals, a wallet made from electrical tape.
But I couldn’t let him attempt a tree-felling in the back yard. I knew he would swing that heavy axe until success—or disaster—prevailed.
“No, you can’t have Dad’s axe,” I said, and I braced for battle.
“You never let me do anything I want!” he shouted, with one fist balled and the other on the doorknob. “I WANT to... I'm going to... YOU CAN’T STOP ME!"
It had gone over precisely as expected. My almost 7-year-old is a child of passion and persistence, a boy with a will of bulldozer intensity that I both fiercely admire and struggle to direct.
"I have rules because I love you; because I love you, I have rules," I found myself saying. "If I didn't have rules—if I let you run around and do whatever you wanted—it would mean I DIDN’T love you."
"That doesn't make any sense, Mom," he said, with a flail of his arms. "If you loved me, you'd let me do what I want to do—all the time!"
I paused. My almost 7-year-old had just plainly articulated the existential crisis of childhood, if not also of the Christian moral life.
"It is hard to understand," I agreed. I did my best to explain. "When I say ‘no,’ it's not because I don’t love you. It’s because I DO. I love your body—and I love your soul. I love you so much that I have to set limits. I have to say ‘no’ to some of the things you want that might hurt you, or others, or God."
“But I’m not going to hurt myself… or anyone else! I just need an axe to cut down a tree!” he insisted.
“Well, sometimes—especially when we really want something—we can’t always see how it might be hurtful,” I said. “But we have rules so we don't do harm, even by accident. I can’t let you have the axe because it's sharp and heavy. You might hurt yourself or someone else with it. Or, the tree you chop down could fall on top of a person or a building.”
He continued to push back, to resist, and question. At almost 7, it is amazing to watch him come into the age of reason. If I can empathize but not enable, he permits me to appeal to his logic—and these appeals seem to work, to stick. In an age where so many adults have set aside their brains, complicit in the distortion of truth and denial of reality, it is like divine consolation to watch my child exercise his power of reason.
And yet, love and logic don’t always win out in the moment. At almost 7, he still wants what he wants.
In this case, I could tell from the nature of his protests that he understood “why” he couldn’t have the axe, but he was still having trouble surrendering his will and desire for it. I offered him a litany of things he could do, suggested alternate ways to build a pirate ship. Something eventually appealed to him, and he was satisfied enough to let go of his fight for the axe.
It was progress—a slim victory of grace for both of us.
Over the next days and weeks, I found myself holding, reflecting on this event in my heart. Motherhood is such a brutal, beautiful mirror of parallels to the spiritual life. In this scuffle with my son, I saw so plainly my own struggle against my heavenly parent, the ultimate authority, the giver of the divine law—that loving Father from whom I received life, and to whom I owe obedience. Do I not, still, act like my almost 7-year-old toward Him? How many times have I stomped and shouted, argued and protested—even sinfully subverted—His will?
The age of reason may dawn around 7, but a loving obedience is a lifelong practice of acceptance, surrender, self-control, and self-denial—steeped in the desire to please the Father by avoiding sin and doing His will.
Before I truly loved the Father with my mind, my heart, and my life, I rejected His law. I balled my fist and turned away from Him, my will shouting the same words as my son, "But I WANT to... I'm going to... YOU CAN’T STOP ME!" I went further, too; I took that destructive next step. I defied His “no.” I went out the door to wield the axe of sin, as He watched in bleeding sorrow, His arms stretched out wide behind me. Did I know—did I care—that my Father’s “no” came from a place of deepest love of me?
These days, the trip-wire for me is not as much knowledge as it is obedience. The Father’s “no” is hard for me to hear, and harder, still, to obey. It is as St. Paul writes:
“I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do... So then, I of myself serve the law of God with my mind, but with my flesh I serve the law of sin” (Romans 7:18-19, 25).
Knowledge can convince the mind, form the conscience, even stir the heart. But knowledge, alone, does not dissolve desire; it doesn’t automate our will into carrying out the right action. I can simultaneously know what’s right, know what I should do, even want to do it, but still thrash and flail or flat-out refuse. Like my almost 7-year-old son, I get hung-up on what I want that it is hard for me to make a joyful and loving surrender. Mine is too often a grudging obedience, at best. I forget the very thing I wish to teach my son: that the Father’s “no” is really a synonym for “I love you.”
For just as I lovingly forbade my son from playing with an axe, God the Father also lovingly forbids me, and the rest of His precious children, from engaging certain, damaging human thoughts and behaviors that He has condemned as sinful—that is, deficient in the perfection of love.
Yet, if it had not been for the law, I should not have known sin. I should not have known what it is to covet if the law had not said, “You shall not covet”… So the law is holy, and the commandment is holy and just and good.” (Romans 7:7, 12)
Unlike the bad parent, the abuser, Satan, who pretends away the damage of sin—sliding sharp and bloody axe our way with a suggestive “you do you” wink—God the Most Loving Father will not help us harm ourselves or others by condoning sin.
Rather, our Most Loving Father holds and repeats a firm and merciful “no” to those deadly axes that “cry to heaven for vengeance”—things like abortion (Genesis 4:10), homosexual acts (Genesis 18:20-21), oppression of the poor (Exodus 2:23), excess government taxation (James 5:4). He condemns those harmful hatchets so common to motherhood, too—yelling and grumbling and criticizing, despair and self-pity, idle scrolling, sluffing off chores, indifference, lack of loving discipline, spiritual neglect, impulse buying, gossip, procrastination, house or hair or husband envy, drugs and drunkenness, blistering resentment, consuming of offensive content, overeating, manipulation, cursing and white lies, immodesty, setting a bad example for children, etc.
Sin is disordered behavior. It wounds me; it wounds His other precious children; it wounds Him. As our Most Loving Father, God can’t bear to see us hurt, for this hurts Him, too. The Father empathizes with our pain, but He does not bend His rules around our disordered desires. As Jesus, Himself, said,
“Think not that I have come to abolish the law and the prophets; I have come not to abolish them but to fulfil them. For truly, I say to you, till heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the law until all is accomplished. Whoever then relaxes one of the least of these commandments and teaches men so, shall be called least in the kingdom of heaven; but he who does them and teaches them shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven. For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.” (Matthew 5:17-20)
It helps to trust God, to believe, in earnest, that He, as our Most Loving Father, wants our best when He commands us to avoid sin. He has told us “no,” not because He doesn’t love us or want our happiness, but because He does. He wishes to spare us the physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual damage of sin. God has rules because He doesn’t want us to lose our limbs—or our soul. The axe of sin divides us from each other, and it separates us from Him; it causes the injury, even death, of the soul. The Father loves us too much for that. He can’t bear to be apart from us—it’s why He came down to us as Jesus; it’s why He walked the earth as the God-Man, to be crucified that the gates of heaven might be opened to us; it’s why He remains wholly present to us in all the tabernacles and monstrances and consecrated Eucharistic Hosts throughout the world. Our Most Loving Father tells us “no” to sin because He wants for us the happiness of being led across this earth by His hand to our final home in His arms—with Him fully—in heaven.
“For I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord, plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope” (Jeremiah 29:11)
And so, if we dare think ourselves Catholic, Christian—if we dare claim to love the Lord our Father at all—we must do our best to avoid all sin, to uphold His “no” in our mind, our heart, our will. God will not force our obedience. We are not His robots. He warns us against sin, against the natural and eternal consequences of committing it, but He gives us free will. We have the choice between sin and obedience, between selfishness and the love of God and neighbor. For Jesus says,
“If you love me, you will keep my commandments… He who does not love me does not keep my words” (John 14:15, 24).
We must make that most difficult and deliberate decision to obey His laws, to play inside the fenced pasture of His love, even when it feels like a rusty, suffocating cage of rules.
Desire will, eventually, pass. But in the case of temptation and struggle, where the tidal wave of what we want threatens to swell into the tsumami of willful disobedience, we still—like my 7 year-old-son—have options. There are so many fruits we can eat; we must not focus on the shiny, poisoned apples of the one tree God has made off-limits to us. We make the choice to turn away, in prayer and distraction, until the disordered desire fades.
After all, “thou shalt not” and “no, you can’t” are merely the loving parent’s way of saying, “I want something better for you—I love you too much to let you hurt yourself, others, or me in this way.”
We must remember: He has rules because He loves us—because He loves us, He has rules.
