Turn Your “No, But” into a “Yes, And”
The Fr. Mike Schmitz Catholic Podcast
Ascension
4.9 • 7.7K Ratings
🗓️ 25 March 2021
⏱️ 9 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
When was the last time you said “yes” to God?
In improv, there’s a practice where participants are encouraged to never respond with “no, but” and to instead offer a “yes, and...” This allows for not only growth in the scene but in the actors as well. Similarly, God is always offering us different “scenes” to get us to sainthood. How are we responding? Turning our “no, but” into a “yes, and” opens our life to Christ’s will, and is the quickest path to sanctification.
Today, Fr. Mike explains how we can practice a better relationship with God by just saying “yes, and...”
Ascension is proud to partner with authentically Catholic institutions and organizations committed to spreading the Gospel. Learn more about the sponsor of this episode, Ave Maria University.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I'm a fan of the theatre. The theatre, the theatre, what happened to the theatre? |
| 0:04.3 | We're not going to start that way. Nope. |
| 0:19.0 | Hi, my name is Father Mike Schmitz and this is a sense of presence. When it comes to the theatre, |
| 0:22.4 | I don't know, I'm no expert, but I think there are two kinds of the theatre, right? There's |
| 0:27.6 | there is the scripted theatre, which is there's a script. That's why they call it scripted theatre, |
| 0:32.0 | where someone has written down the lines and it's the actors' job and the directors' job |
| 0:36.3 | to figure out how are we going to deliver these lines. But there's another kind of theatre and |
| 0:40.6 | that kind of theatre is unscripted aka improv aka improvisational theatre. That was a long |
| 0:45.9 | lead in wasn't it to something everybody knows because of whose line is it anyways? There's one |
| 0:49.9 | cardinal rule and the one cardinal rule when you're doing improv is it's never no but. Like so if |
| 0:57.6 | the other people are doing something you don't like, if they're going down this road that you don't |
| 1:02.0 | agree with or you wish they would go somewhere else, you never say no, but I will do this other |
| 1:07.3 | thing. It's never you never contradict the people you're doing the improv with. You always agree |
| 1:13.4 | and then add to it. So it's never no but. It's always yes and that's like the cardinal rule of |
| 1:19.0 | improv. It's always yes and right? So the idea behind this is I mean think about it. Here's |
| 1:25.0 | someone who's doing some improv and again you don't like the way they're doing it, you don't like |
| 1:29.0 | the road they're going, you don't like the story they're telling. So you want to stop it and you want |
| 1:32.8 | to go into different direction. That's no but and that's not allowed. It's always yes. What you've |
| 1:40.6 | just done is what you just did. We're live right now. We are making this story up as we're going so |
| 1:45.9 | I'm going to yes and add to it. Now the reason why I'm bringing up here in the center in the |
| 1:51.1 | center presents video is because a lot of times the way we live our lives with other people with |
| 1:56.4 | the Lord even with ourselves is no but. It's so what I mean by that is here's someone who's |
... |
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