King's Corner: When God Says “No”
King's Corner column for April 11, 2025
Traveling by air from South Australia to Reno usually takes around a full day if you make all your connections, longer if you don’t. This became an annual ritual as I lived down under while my dad, Mark King, and step-mom Luanne lived here. Then came COVID-19 and instead of several flights daily there was just one, and you could only board with special permission from the tightly-locked-island-continent’s government. Never did distance seem so vast.
Yet at the bottom of the world life went on as normal. I started a new job on a six month contract that promised to extend into long term employment. I tackled a major challenge, designing the move of the state electricity provider’s systems and data into a newly-configured version of “the cloud”, that vague phrase that describes an oversized cluster of computers almost no one will ever actually see. Life amid the distant crisis was going well, with a promising future.
Work took me out for a meal, a celebration of the challenging phase we’d just finished weeks ahead of the deadline that no one thought was even achievable. They let me know how much they appreciated my work, but someone else would be carrying that project forward. I was suddenly done, and a month early.
God, what just happened? All my plans had just been turned upside-down. It seemed very unfair. Yet life is often not fair. Each of us could tell stories of life taking unforeseen turns, sometimes taking a terrible toll.
What do you do when God says “No”?
I would suggest that the first thing you do is this: You recognise that God saying "No" is just as much a demonstration of his love as his saying "Yes."
There was a time when I worked with difficult boys. They were as different as day and night. But there was one common factor that seemed to appear in them all. And while they were not sophisticated enough to grasp this being so, this was very obvious to one looking at it objectively.
They all said that they had not been loved by their parents. And they all advanced - as the illustration of that lovelessness - the fact that their parents never disciplined them. Never said "No" to them. It would come out like this:
"My parents didn't care about me. They didn't care when I came in at night."
"My parents didn't care about me. They didn't care what I ate, or whether I ate or not."
Expressions, you see, of lack of discipline. You know how it is if you have a dog that you don't care anything about at all, you'll let that dog run where it wants to run, eat what it wants to eat - you'll take no care of that dog. But if you really are concerned for the dog, you discipline it. You train it. You do the things which are necessary to make that dog into everything which that dog has the capability of being. Your "No"s to that dog are just as much expressions of caring as your "Yes"s.
Any parent understands that in the moment when he or she says "No" to a child, they might be demonstrating a deeper love than any number of "Yes"s they might utter. And it's important that we grasp that when we're talking about the "No"s of God.
Now here's another thing to remember: God says "No" because he has a better idea.
In Nevada my dad had an accident the year before where he lost most of his sight. My step-mom was fighting cancer and was about to have a risky operation. Over the distance I could offer concern and consolation, but little more during the worldwide lockdown. Then from the hospital I received the news she had not survived the operation. Suddenly dad was on his own, and needed help.
And that job I’d been so heavily committed to had just suddenly – unexpectedly – finished three days before. I was available.
“He never closes a door without opening a window.”
It was Helen Keller who said that. She was blind, and she was deaf, and she was dumb. Now none of us have ever heard the "No"s of God like that. But it was Helen Keller who said,
"He never closes a door without opening a window"
In Australia during the COVID crisis no one could enter or leave without government permission, granted for only extraordinary reasons. But they were responsive to my story of my dad’s plight, and a few days later I had a ticket on the only flight out.
My dad and I then had the best year-and-a-half of our lives together, a precious and often hilarious time when he finished out his 96 years actively, until one night he kept sleeping. A time I might have missed if God hadn’t closed a door but opened a window.
I can sum it in a single sentence, but it’s taken me my whole life to learn the sentence: Some of the loveliest things God has ever said to me began with the words, "My beloved child, No."
