Y is for Yield

The LAYER Method, Part Three

The natural world has its unrelenting demands, deadlines, definitions of success, measures of worth, and a very clear script for how life should look and what we should prioritize. We live under constant, visible pressure. That pressure is everywhere. It is loud, tangible, and relentless. And because we experience it in the natural world, we can see it, touch it, and feel its consequences in real time. So, we do what comes naturally, we concede. We yield to the world’s systems almost by default, without ever consciously making a choice. Most of us are on autopilot, disciplined to move in the direction of least resistance, shaped by systems that were designed almost entirely by people, and not by God.

We know this because the Bible tells us in John 18:36 “My Kingdom is not of this world” and Isaiah 55:8-9 also teaches us, “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord. As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.”

What we are called to spiritually does not always naturally align with the construct of modern society. Purpose doesn’t always come with a title. Obedience doesn’t always come with a paycheck. God’s hand is spiritually constant but physically unseen, His timing rarely matches our urgency, and the logic of the Kingdom of Heaven does not always make sense to the people around us, including the ones who love us most. What He asks us to prioritize rarely maps with the metrics the world uses to measure a life well lived.

And yet, most of us keep trying to do both. We try to honor God and meet the world’s expectations. We try to walk in faith and still arrive at the destinations the world tells us to travel to. We stretch ourselves across two very different systems, wondering why we feel so tired, so conflicted, so perpetually behind. I would argue that is not an accident. It is exactly what the enemy intends.

So how do we navigate a walk of faith in a world of complex layers full of distractions and chaos? How do we yield to the unseen and release the pressure to be defined by the familiar? The answer is not a strategy or a self-help framework. It is a relationship. I believe the answer is found in the relationship we have with a God who speaks to us, through His Word, through the Holy Spirit who dwells in us, through Jesus who modeled what it actually looks like to live in full surrender to the Father’s will, in a world that had very different plans for Him. That relationship is the very thing that makes yielding possible. And it is also the very thing that makes the cost of not yielding so clear.

Because once you Listen and hear His voice, once you have done the work of Align and genuinely begin to discover what He desires for your life and the season you’re in, you cannot unknow it. You are standing at a crossroads. And the question Yield asks is a simple one, even when the answer is not:

Will you give way to the world’s demands, or to His?

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If you’ve been walking with us through this series, you know where we’ve been.

In Listen, we talked about the work of tuning our spiritual ears. Not passive hearing, but the intentional, disciplined practice of slowing down long enough to actually hear God’s voice through prayer, through Scripture, through the quiet prompting of the Holy Spirit. And just as importantly, we talked about learning to separate His truth from the noise the enemy uses to fill that same space. The fear. The shame. The worry. The guilt. Because both are always vying for our attention, and because the latter masks itself really well, they do not always sound as distinctly different as we’d like them to. It takes work, deliberate and intentional work to Listen.

In Align, we asked the harder question. Not just “what am I hearing?” but “what does God actually want from me, in this season, in this moment?” What does He desire for our lives? Who are we called to be in the lives of others? What does faithfulness look like right here, right now, not in some imagined future version of our story, but today? Align is where we hold our choices, our focus, our priorities up against the nature of God and honestly ask ourselves if our actions and the way we are living our lives truly reflect Him.

And now we arrive at Yield.

Which, I think, is where things get a little more complicated.

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Long before I retired, I felt like something was off.

Not specifically at work. More like... underneath it. The goals I had always seemed to meet an expectation that wasn’t fully my own. A promotion, a higher salary, a big title, a nice house, a newer car, more money in the bank. All of it placing me in a never-ending cycle of more stress, more hustle, more grind. And with every accomplishment, I’d celebrate for a moment, then almost immediately feel the anxiety of knowing I’d have to do it all over again. I had purpose in every assignment, but towards the end of my career, after almost 23 years inside the federal bureaucracy, I found myself operating on autopilot, moving to feed the subtle expectation and unspoken belief that the stress, the hustle, and the grind are pieces of evidence that society requires to validate whether you are doing things right. Because in American society if you’re not hustling, you’re lazy, if you’re not grinding you’re unambitious, and if you’re not stressed, you’re likely not doing enough of something.

Throughout my career, one of my rewards was a once or twice a year vacation, usually international, with my husband, family, or friends. If you know anything about me, you know that after God and the people I love, I love to travel. Something almost magical happens to me when I leave American soil. My husband always says I become a completely different person, and he is not wrong. I like to tell him that when I travel, I become a citizen of the world, and the liberation that gives me is unlike anything else I experience at home. The pace slows. The noise quiets.

When I was working, it usually took me 3 or 4 days to fully let go when on vacation, and even then I’d leave a personal contact number behind, because I carried this intense guilt of abdicating my responsibilities and not being available for people who might rely on me. But in time, in that vacation bubble, with no agenda and very little preplanned, I’d get small, honest glimpses of my true self. What I actually valued. A deeper sense for what I was actually created for. Somewhere in the quiet moments of those trips, with experiences and more personal revelation building year over year, I came to realize that I was beginning to develop a practice of surrender. Not because I had it figured out spiritually, but because I had temporarily stepped outside the system that told me surrender was failure. And outside of that system, I could finally experience something that felt, for the first time, like an awareness of God’s true intention for creating me...maybe even for creating all of us.

That feeling stayed with me. And as my final year in government service became more and more complicated, I kept returning to it. That contrast between the constructed system and the spiritual one. Between what the world said I should be building and what God was quietly, but persistently calling me toward.

Now, in retirement I understand what that feeling was telling me. And for me, it was the beginning of living a life Yielded unto God.

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And I want to be clear about something, because I know not everyone reading this has a passport or a desire to travel and leave America. Trust me, as a Coach that is not my prescribed antidote for anyone’s problems (although I believe it is very good medicine for our souls, and can personally attest to how much it helps me navigate my own). My story involves a love of travel because that is where God tends to meet me and give me revelation. But Yield will look different for everyone, because we are not all carrying the same things and we do not all have the same assignment.

Yielding might look like finally leaving a career that has defined you for twenty years because God is now pointing toward something smaller, quieter, and entirely more purposeful. It might look like saying no to the committee, the board, the volunteer role, the family obligation you’ve said yes to for so long that the yes has become an identity. It might look like starting the business you’ve been calling a hobby because owning it fully always felt far too risky. It might look like having a conversation you’ve been avoiding for years because the peace on the other side of it might require you to give up the need to be right.

Our need to Yield rarely announces itself in some big dramatic moment. More often, it shows up as a silent, but persistent nudge that something you are holding onto so tightly might not be yours to continue carrying. A restlessness you cannot explain. A peace that surfaces every time you imagine letting go of the very thing that at one point you thought you could not live without. That is the Holy Spirit. That is His invitation.

Whatever you need to Yield, I can almost guarantee it will not fully make sense to the world around you. It may not even fully make sense to you, or to the people who love you most. But if you have done the work of Listen and heard God’s voice, if you have done the work of Align and honestly measured your life against His nature and His calling for the season you find yourself in, then Yield will not feel so much like a leap into the unknown.

It will feel like finally understanding why the challenges you face are there. And maybe for the first time, you will have the clarity of purpose and the permission you need to put down what is not meant for this season, without the guilt or shame of letting it go.

As a Coach, I walk this path with my clients every day. It is not easy work, but I believe it is my most important work. And if you would like support on your walk of Faith, I would be honored to join you on your journey.

Zia

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The My Faith at Work (MFAW) Coaching Methodology, LAYER, stands for (L)isten, (A)lign, (Y)ield, (E)mbed, (R)elease. This is the third in a MFAW series walking through each principle of my coaching framework.