I think the Lord is testing me this week. He’s asking me to surrender everything that I am stubbornly holding on to, and it’s really hard.
This weekend we had a church retreat and the theme for the weekend was renewal. I walked in expectant of a few days of rest but what I experienced was very different. This was the weekend God opened my eyes to things I was continuing to struggle with, well actually things that I had white-knuckled without even realizing. Instead of asking why I was being so disobedient to God’s cry to leave it at the cross, I tried to fix it on my own. In seasons of prayerlessness instead of asking what caused my heart to ignore God, I just started praying. Instead of asking why I was so anxious, I just told myself that the Lord didn’t desire for me to be anxious and I got over it. This weekend, the time I had to rest my soul was really spent cleaning out what had built up. In this process I was confused and angry and frustrated that I didn’t go to God when he invited me in.
But I wasn’t called to get angry and frustrated with myself for muscling my way through disobedience and making myself more Christ-like. No, I was called to surrender. He wants me to surrender my relationships. He wants me to surrender my anxiety. He wants me to surrender my stress and a new house and forgotten medication. It’s a beautiful broken but it sucks. There will be things that I desire that I won’t get. Like a perfect grade on a test that was I too stressed to study for or an instant fix to something I broke. But he wants me to surrender those desires to him also, and it sucks. This weekend I was overwhelmed by my desperate need for a savior but instead of running to him, I freaked out.
But he wants me to surrender this weekend too. I can’t change the past but I can surrender the now. I can stress and worry about whether everything will work out or I can be present in this moment and let God do his thing. And it’s going to be really hard because my human instinct is to hold onto it all. I think I can fix it and I think I can say the right thing and do the right thing and everything will work out but I can’t. My situation brings the most glory to God when I recognize that I can’t and I surrender it to him. Just let him take the reins.
