What does Britney Spears flinging her hair have to do with this blog post? Lots. But first, a little history. During the 80’s and early 90’s, the U.S. government’s campaign on drugs rallied around one particular slogan: “Just say no.” Championed by Nancy Reagan, the campaign offered children various ways to say “No” to illegal drug use, violence, and premarital sex. They plastered the slogan on signs, garbage cans, magazines, buses, and school supplies. We couldn’t escape it even if we wanted to. So there was a time when “Just say no!” had some real cultural traction.
I have no data on the campaign’s success. Maybe it worked and maybe it didn’t. What I do know is this:
Just saying no will never be enough. It’s only one side of the coin. Necessary, but insufficient. Every “No” needs a “Yes.” For every temptation to avoid, we need something good to embrace.
Just saying no might effectively remove something from our lives, but without something to say “Yes!” to, we create a vacuum. It is true that nature abhors a vacuum. People abhor a vacuum too. We will fill negative space with something and it’s usually not something positive. We replace one sin with another sin. We see this best exemplified by the Israelites who knew how to say “No” to foreign idols, but forgot how to embrace God instead. God told them “Don’t worship those idols. Worship me.” They failed to worship God and created their own idol to fill the void.
[pullquote hidden=true] Every “No” needs a “Yes.” For every temptation to avoid, we need something good to embrace. [/pullquote]
Unfortunately, many parents spend all their effort teaching their kids to say “No” to particular cultural influences and forget to teach them how and when to say “Yes.”
Back in the day before Britney Spears cartwheeled off the popularity cliff, back when she was a household name and Pepsi’s poster child, she used to flaunt her stuff on a host of advertisements. We couldn’t watch a sporting event without her. Like a jack-in-the-box, she jumped us at every break in the action. One of my daughters, probably about five at the time, had made the correlation between the immodest woman of proverbs and Britney Spears.
I didn’t figure it out for awhile. All I noticed was that my daughter hurled herself behind the couch during every Pepsi advertisement. I finally asked her what the deal was and she pointed toward the screen and told me. I had no problem with my daughter making that kind of cultural connection with Scripture. I had no problem that she was making that kind of moral judgement. But I worried that she didn’t know what to embrace as an alternative. “Go ahead and say no, dear. I don’t want you to embrace the Britney lifestyle, but what will you embrace instead?”
My wife and I decided to fill that void with close-to-home examples of godly women we wanted her to imitate. The battle was (and is) more than just about immodesty, so we found modest women who had additional traits that we admired: prayerfulness, thankfulness, gentleness, patience, kindness, joy, self-control, etc. We rallied her affections around those role models. We reminded her to imitate them. When she regressed, we asked her what they would do. Her admiration for those women motivated her to imitate them. I’m not convinced that if we had just told her to avoid the Britney syndrome, she would have naturally gravitated to something more godly. She, like the rest of us, needs something concrete to draw her affections.
Christ is, of course, the ultimate aim of our affections, but we are often drawn to him by people who love him. We learn to love him because they love him. Yes, the world is full of people and things that draw our love away from Christ, but teaching our kids to just say “No” to drugs, Bruno Mars, premarital sex, and Miley Cyrus will never be enough. They need something to love instead. Judgement is important, but only the start. What we really need are creational practices, people who offer us something more noble, more thankful, and more joyful to love. Say “No” to this and say “Yes” to that. After all, we’re are more deeply moved by our “Yes” than our “No.” Or put another way, it is our “Yes” that defines us, not our “No.”
[pullquote hidden=true]Teaching our kids to just say “No” to drugs, premarital sex, and Miley Cyrus will never be enough. They need something to love instead. [/pullquote]
Here’s a question for you: what are some of the consequences of just saying “No”?
