I Surrender All

Well, practically speaking…I took a bus in Romania to the
Bucharest Airport, hopped a flight to Doha, Quatar and then another one to
Johannesburg, South Africa. I boarded a bus to a hostel then grabbed a couple
more buses and…well, you get the idea.

It’s not as if I woke up one day and thought…”Gee, today I
think I’ll go check out this remote little country called Swaziland”.

I mean…who really knows where that IS anyways? If I didn’t know better I’d say it sounds like some
kind of African safari theme park.

Spiritually speaking it was more of a gradual process…I had
to wrestle with God for several years to come to a place of complete surrender
(which I still have to work at every day). I had to tell Him I would go
wherever He wanted to take me. That’s not an easy thing…by the way…to give up
control. I’m sure you can imagine.

As Americans we love to have control. We want to control
everything around us…control our finances, control our weight, control our emotions,
control the tv remote, control the temperature, even control people around us.

On the World Race you are often forced to give up your right
to control. No longer do you have a say
in where you go, what you eat, how you spend your time, sometimes even what you
will wear. Most of us think we inherently have the right to control these
things. We consider ourselves to be vulnerable and weak if we are not in
control.

But the Lord says, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my
power is made perfect in weakness” -2 Corinthians 12:9.

 At times it has been
a struggle for me to know that no matter how hard I might try, I cannot control
my circumstances. Like a couple weeks
ago when I found out a bunch of us had lice (which thankfully I was able to get
rid of…) or last week when I sprained my ankle… or this week when my credit
card company cancelled my credit card because my identity had been stolen by
someone in Switzerland (which in fact was just me using it in Swaziland).

We try to keep it all together and get frustrated when we
feel like we have to juggle it all. But Colossians 1:17 says “He is before all
things, and in Him all things hold together”.

And that’s kind of a freeing feeling, isn’t it? …knowing
that I don’t have to hold it all together.

Because I tend to make a mess of it anyways.

So the question is…what is it that YOU need to surrender
today???