Surrender

I like to feel in control of just about every aspect of my life. I imagine I share that desire with many of you. I want predictability, consistancy and reliability in anything and everything. Obviously, that is largely unrealistic. Life happens every single day, and usually just when I start to feel comfortable and in control of one area of my life, God reminds me that just isn’t the way things are supposed to be.

I don’t know about you, but I have never felt less in control of my surroundings than I have the last two years. We all are in the same boat - our struggles look different, but we all have had to deal with unexpected circumstances throughout the pandemic.  

Some folks have been deeply affected financially. Many people, specifically young people, have struggled with their mental health. Others have struggled spiritually for many different reasons. And of course we all probably know someone who has died or been hospitalized because of Covid as well.

Pre-covid one of my favorite things to teach on was surrendering ourselves to God. I imagine that had a lot to do with my own struggle with truely surrendering to God myself and letting go of control.  

In the midst of Covid and as we hopefully start to move closer to post pandemic life, surrender means something a little different to me. I have experienced something much closer to what total lack of control of my surroundings really looks like now. I have been “into the unknown” to quote Elsa from Frozen 2.  

I’ve used this quote from C.S. Lewis before, but it’s been bouncing around in my head so I want to share it again. He said this in his book, The Problem of Pain.

“We do not know how many of these creatures God made, nor how long they continued in the Paradisal state. But sooner or later they fell. Someone or something whispered that they could become as gods--that they could cease directing their lives to their creator and taking all their delights as unconventional mercies, as “accidents” (in the most logical sense) which arose in the course of a life directed not to those delights but to the adoration of God. As a young man wants a regular allowance from his father which he can count on as his own, within which he makes his own plans (and rightly, for his father is after all a fellow creature), so they desired to be on their own, to take care for their own future, to plan for pleasure and for security to have a meum from which, no doubt, they would pay some reasonable tribute to God in the way of time attention and love, but which, nevertheless, was theirs not His. They wanted, as we say, to “call their souls their own.” But that means to live a lie, for our souls are not, in fact, our own. They wanted some corner in the universe of which they could say to God, “This is our business, not yours.” But there is no such corner.  They wanted to be nouns, but they were, and eternally must be, mere adjectives.”

He is referencing the original sin here when he says “Someone or something whispered that they could become like gods.” That idea was intoxicating enough to Adam and Eve to give up perfection in the Garden. I can’t really fault them either, because that is the root of my desire to be in control. Being “like God” certainly sounds like a good deal.

I absolutely love the last line there in the quote, we all want to be nouns, but we are and eternally must be mere adjectives. When I desire control, I want to be the subject. When we fill in your blank, we want to be the subject. But we are and eternally must be people who describe, reflect and point back to God.

Essentially what he is saying here is that we have to surrender to Him. If I had to boil down what I have learned through Covid to one simple statement, it would be that I have to be more dependent on Him.

I told my daughter, Lily, when she was younger that “daddy knows everything” and she really believed me. She would try to stump me, but she was 2 or 3 years old then, so I knew at least everything that she knew. Now that she is a smart little 4 year old, she regularly calls me out when I in fact do not know everything. Each time she does that, I am reminded that one, I am not smarter than a 4 year old and two, I have limitations. Limitations which prove that I am in fact not in control and that I do need to surrender to Jesus daily. 

Today my hope and prayer is that we all take a step toward being the best adjective that we can be by surrendering and letting God be the noun.