Kindle Notes & Highlights
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September 6 - September 20, 2018
Improv taught me that there was no master plan or single truth. My job was to listen and discover
“The biggest problem I had with you becoming a Christian is you lost all your spontaneity.”
book wades in deep and offers a better way through those Dark Nights of the Soul. We can learn to accept failure and ambiguity without capitulating to them.
your well-laid plans don’t always rule the day.
We improvise in order to get through the day.
The church said Yes. The church improvised.
the first rule is “Yes, And.” But we’ll get to “And” in Section 2 of the book.
It’s wrong to deface property. It sends the wrong message to let the vandalism remain there. Better to work with police to root out the culprits. And yet the church staff told me with pride that once the mural appeared, the wall was never defaced with graffiti again. In fact, the mural project became a much-needed bridge to the young people in the community.
Instead, the people there accepted it as the place they needed to start—the reality as it was handed to them. They said Yes.
So Yes isn’t merely what we do when we improvise, but how we do it.
can set aside my plans in order to care for a sick child grudgingly. I can meet the roadside assistance guy resentfully. Or I can do these things Yes-ly: with grace, and with the expectation that something surprising may occur.
We are not in control of our lives. But we can choose Yes.
Does God provide a gentle nudge, but leave the rest to us? We’ll plumb these questions throughout the book.
Jesus’s first sign in John’s Gospel may be my favorite—because it’s the one Jesus never planned to perform. It isn’t on his agenda. The timing isn’t right, he insists to his
God experiments, changes God’s mind, and works in partnership with God’s people to bring about the Yes that’s at the heart of improv—and also the gospel.
“Exodus” is a Greek word and literally means “a way out.”1 Not the way out, a way
God who worked with the situation at hand. The “how” of God’s work is incidental; the overarching Yes of liberation is God’s fundamental focus.
When a tsunami sweeps through Asia, or horrific violence rampages through an elementary school, it’s natural to wonder where God is in the midst of it all. These questions are ever-present. Job is the patron saint of these questions.
They believed—as I believe—that God was fiercely present in that suffering, moving them in the direction of wholeness and hope and Yes. They believed
For dorothy n david wedding
third kind of sermon, the No sermon. These
God says No sometimes! In fact, No is indispensable to the gospel.
No enforces limits. It’s a cry of agency: This is not OK with me. I
civil rights movement and other acts of protest have always been punctuated by moments of saying No. No, we will not go to the back of the bus. No, we will not be second-class citizens anymore.
The No isn’t an end in itself, but one of the tools we wield to forge a deeper Yes.
Magnificat, Mary, the mother of Jesus, provides a template for this kind of No-wrapped-in-Yes.
God assessed the demands of the world, and the expectations that a king would come in strength and might and prestige, and said, No, I’d just as soon not. And in her song Mary echoes this divine No. No to the proud and their haughty ways. No to hunger that goes unfed. No to suffering unrelieved. No, no, no.
the improviser’s job to find that Yes—and sometimes No helps us to get there. Rather
Yes is a hollow response if it doesn’t come with the possibility of everything going catastrophically wrong. Yes is infused with curiosity, mystery, and a hint of danger. We don’t know how life will turn out. It costs us something to step into that ambiguity.
Love itself is a risky Yes. When I was in training for ministry, I volunteered
“What is it costing you to do nothing in this situation? And what would it cost you to act?”
costs of doing nothing are higher than the risks of stepping out and taking a chance—of
Second City Training Center in Chicago, “Nobody wants to see you in neutral.”
Sooner or later, someone has to And. We can’t just receive what life offers us.
We can block the offer. We can refuse to receive what’s being offered: we can resist, say no, and run the other way.
We can accept the offer. According to Wells, option two is to receive what’s given—to pick it up and acknowledge it, but otherwise to do very little with it. This
We can “over-accept.” This is how Wells describes the experience of Yes-And, of accepting the offer and building on it. This is the move of the improviser.
Jesus’s message and his movement toward the reign of God lead directly to his execution by the powerful elite. But Jesus doesn’t try to block this outcome—mounting an army to fight the forces of Rome, say, or stealing away to another country to live the rest of his days in seclusion.
does he merely accept
Jesus over-accepts, proclaiming forgiveness and grace for his executioners while hanging from the very cross that was meant to humiliate and defeat him.
a gift is simply a thing that is given. It’s too chipper to suggest that every gift contains something positive. But gifts do often contain potential.
Yes as the foundation of the biblical story.
God is a God who says Yes. That Yes isn’t static—it moves us somewhere.
always stirs us in the direction of more surprising grace, more radical community, and deeper wholeness. Which means ...
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ongoing state of improvisa...
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building on situations, and surviving on their wits—all in rel...
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Throughout the Bible, improvisation is a tool of the powerless against the powerful. Joseph, interpreter of dreams, improvises
Is this Jesus’s human side poking through the divine exoskeleton? Is Jesus toying with her to see what she’ll do? I doubt I’ll ever find a satisfactory explanation. All things being equal, I prefer a messiah that doesn’t call women dogs.
she over-accepts. She embraces his metaphor and builds on it to make her point. “Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.”
self-expression and creativity lit up during the improvisations. But more surprising is that other areas of the brain went quiet—specifically, the portions of the brain that govern inhibition.
Yes-And flows best when we’re focused solely on that task rather than our own sense of propriety.1
