I am on a train heading from Boston, South Station to Penn Station in New York City. We have been spending a few days in New York and then visited family in Boston. Today, before boarding the train, we spent a couple of hours with an Italian family and friends, and they stuffed us. These people do not know the concept of moderation. They kept bringing out entree after entree, and then they kept bringing out one dessert after another. And you just can't say, “No”.Like AFTER salad, barbecued chicken, steak, sausage, various kinds of pasta, and both white and red wine, they brought out the stuffed lobster. “Are you kidding?!” We just rolled our eyes. After that it was several kinds of pastry, chocolate-covered strawberries, chocolate-covered almonds and marshmallows, and cheesecake. Oh yes. There was also fruit: grapes and cherries.Now, on the train, I am fighting the tendency to go to sleep.We spent time with our son, daughter-in-law, and their son, who is our grandson. We have had the privilege of being present for his first tooth and now for his emergence into the terrible twos. The key word was “no”. He could say it various ways, and he could shape it into various combinations. There was the ubiquitous “no grandma” or “no grandpa”. Even the occasional “no mommy” and “no daddy”. These were sometimes accompanied with a shoving away motion of the hands, and there was the “no peek-a-boo”.However, if you gave this child the iPad, with its child developmental apps on it, he would gladly accept. He is a child of the digital age. He knows how to use an iPad, and I don't. What has the world come to? I am tied to the keyboard and this kid is going to be talking to computers and thinking his way through digital commands that the machines will either track through his retina or just pick up from his brain waves.When his kids say “no” what kind of gadget will he use to occupy their minds and bring them back around to semi-civility?As “terrible” as that stage of development is, the ability to say “no” is crucial to becoming a person. Children must go through these terrible twos or they will likely never truly develop into mature people who can engage in satisfying relationships. The ability to say no is akin to the ability to knowing what one does and does not want, and the ability to know what one does and does not want is crucial to adult functioning. The ability to say no seems to precede the ability to say yes (that is, to consciously make a choice between options and to favour one thing over another).Some people don't know how to say yes or no to themselves or in their favour. If you ask such a person what he or she is feeling, that person is apt to look puzzled and say, “I don't know” or “What do you mean?” If you then ask that person what they want, they struggle with that one too. This is because the grounded sense of being in the world, of being situated, of being in a place and time with other people, is what gives rise to the sense of being somebody. I am not talking about the inflated sense of self-importance that some aspire to — to be somebody. I am talking about the mundane sense of existing, of actually being some body. Naturally it goes beyond simply being a body, but it has to begin there, and that is because we are also embodied souls or spirits.There is not a little person inside, encapsulated by the body. The body and the person are fused into one being so that what the mind thinks leads to what the body feels, and what the person believes, leads to what the person perceives, and what the person senses through his or her body gives rise to an emergent sense of being that person — somebody.This ability to know what one wants and does not want further, needs no other justification. Perhaps other people might not like what a person wants. Other people might tend to skip right over what one does not want. Perhaps other people might step right on top of a person, disregarding what one wants and does not want with the excuse that what they want isn’t right, does not have good enough rationale to support it, or does not sync with the needs and wishes of other people. In these kinds of assessments other people might even be correct, but that still would not negate the fact that the person in question either does nor does not want something. If given free choice, the person would choose in one direction rather than another.The existence of this preference helps define a person to him or herself, and it is absolutely needed as a prerequisite to denying oneself. Christians are often admonished to deny themselves, pick up their crosses daily and follow Christ in self-sacrificial service to others. That can only come after a person has established what he or she really wants. The call to service is not a call to lose oneself (as if to dissociate and drift off into empty-headedness), but to have a firmly established identity of self that one can then subordinate to the needs of others. And the choice to do so, has to be a real choice. If that is not the case, then a person is not actually making a decision to serve and is just being carried along in the current of religious ritual or legalistic expectation.St Paul invited people to “have this attitude in you which was in Christ Jesus” who, although He existed as God, did not regard the privilege of divinity as something He needed to grasp tightly, but emptied Himself, taking on the form of a human being. And being found in such a form, He served the needs of humankind by dying on the cross. When he prayed in the garden, He asked His father for what He wanted. He wanted that cup to pass away from Him. However, He chose to follow His father to the cross instead. Jesus did not lose His self in emptying Himself of the prerogatives of divinity. No one took His life; He chose to give it freely. God the Father and God the Son wanted to save the world.