Most of us will have heard parents ask their children: “Which bit of the word do you not understand? Is it the N or the O? - because the answer is No”.

I wonder how we as mature adults cope when the answer is ‘no’. Flying off the handle is one response, and other times just disappointment or a general feeling of being upset or depression. Maybe we have not got our own way. Again, I wonder how we react when the answer from God is ‘no’.

At the Maundy Thursday service, I quoted from P T Forsyth, a great Scottish theologian whose books on prayer are gems indeed.
He wrote: “We shall come one day to heaven where we shall gratefully know that God’s refusals were sometimes the true answers to our truest prayer…for it is a greater thing to pray for pain’s conversion than for its removal. It is more of grace to pray that God should make a sacrament of it…It is to consecrate its elements and make it sacramental. It is to convert into prayer”.

Some people simply turn round and say that God is wrong and that they’ll go ahead with their action anyway, come what may. Others will re-double their prayer-life and their pleading with God in the hope of persuading him to change the no into yes. Others will try and strike a bargain with God: if you let do what I think is right or what I want, Lord, then I’ll….” Or conversely, if you don’t make things better, improve my situation, give me what I want, then I’ll give up, leave, stop believing in you. They try to bribe or manipulate God - or simply ignore God’s ‘no’.

It does not work though. God is not for turning. His answer may continue to be no, or not now, or not ever. For those Christians who misuse the Scriptures by saying that everything with God is “Yes and Amen”, this is unpalatable.

If you look at the back of a piece of needlework or weaving, there seems to be no pattern and confusion in the threads and no obvious purpose. That is just how our lives feel at times. Yet the God the Weaver is so much greater than we can imagine that, as it were, if we were to turn the piece of material over, we would see a beautiful and intricate pattern, full of precision and purpose.

God’s noes in life may be hard to accept and live with at the time, they may bring tears and pain, but if, like Jesus, we have trust to say "Not my will, but yours be done”, we will have learnt one of the most important lessons of being a follower of him. We will discover deep within our very souls a sense of inner peace, a sense of wellbeing, as we rest in the centre of God’s purpose and love for us.