The 'No' Factor

Connie Kendall is feeling wanted, and she loves it. After church one Sunday, the pastor invites her to join the Stretcher Bearers, a new program in which young people visit shut-ins, run their errands, and deliver their medicine. He warns her that the job is not a huge time commitment, but it does require her to be dependable; Connie promises she can handle it, and she is assigned to take medicine to a Mrs. Jackson every Tuesday, starting in a couple of weeks.

That is only the beginning. Connie has already signed on as a morning volunteer at the Campbell County College Library, on top of her afternoons at Whit's End, where Eugene has been left in charge while Whit is away in Chicago and is already fussing about her coming in late. Then the invitations pile up. Jack Davis tracks her down at the library and asks her to act in the variety show he is directing for the Parks and Recreation Department, the biggest thing he has ever done. Dale Jacobs of the Odyssey Times wants her to write a paid article about Whit's End - due in ten to twelve days. Marsha calls to ask her to take charge of her class picnic, since the class needs somebody older to carry out the plans. Connie says yes to everything. When her mother asks whether she is taking on too much, Connie insists she has it all figured out, with a set amount of time for each project. Even when June points out that the youth meeting and the first rehearsal land on the same Thursday night, Connie simply plans to split the evening between them.

The week that follows says otherwise. Connie drags herself out of bed at six to write, freezes and then scalds herself in the shower, and struggles for a first sentence at the typewriter. Her days blur together until the library, the shop, the picnic, the rehearsals, and the article all run into one another. She mixes her picnic notes in with her article pages, loses Eugene's library card in a sink of dirty dishes at Whit's End, tells a library patron looking for the bathroom to try Home Improvement, Section 4, Row H, and keeps drifting off while Jack calls her back to her lines. She tells her mother that people have depended on her and nothing has fallen through the cracks, so please, no lectures.

Then June wakes her from a doze with a message: a Mrs. Jackson called, wondering where Connie was. It takes Connie a moment even to remember the name, and then she is out the door. She arrives too late. The pastor is already at the house; when Connie never came, Mrs. Jackson phoned him, and he has picked up her medicine himself. Mrs. Jackson is inside sleeping and will be fine, but Connie is crushed. The Stretcher Bearers were the first thing she agreed to, the one job that asked only that she be dependable, and it is the one thing she let slip.

The pastor tells her he used to do the same thing - take on too many projects, misjudge the time they needed, and end up frustrating everyone who worked with him - until he discovered what he calls the no factor: learning how to say no. Saying no means missing out on things you really want to do, and it means admitting you are human and cannot do everything that comes your way. But that is better than agreeing to everything and letting people down, and the world will not stop turning when you say it. Choosing projects carefully, he says, is being a good steward of your time. Connie agrees to start right away. He offers to take her off the Stretcher Bearers, since he has enough people to cover it, but that is the one commitment she wants to keep; she has a couple of other projects the no factor fits much better. As they head off for a soda, she asks whether the no factor will work the next time her mom tells her to clean her room. The pastor's answer is no.