I want you to do an experiment with me for a second. Think about your plans, your daily routine, and your sense of control. Now just imagine for a second that you could hold those things like a glowing, shimmering ball in the palm of your hand. Just hold it there for a second; give it a really good look. Got that? See how nice that feeling is? Everything seems orderly, and concrete, and oh-so-nicely structured. Everything fits, everything works the way you think it shoud.
Now imagine the ball explodes. It’s a mess. That shimmering, pretty ball just made a sparkly crater, and you’re wondering what just happened. Don’t worry, that sense of panic clawing its way out of your chest is quite normal. In fact, you’re going to learn to embrace it. By the end of 10 days, it won’t even bother you.
I have a life built around structure, order, and schedules. I know exactly how many times I can hit the snooze button before I will be late for work. I know exactly how many minutes it will add to my morning routine to brush my teeth or wash my hair before I leave. I know that from getting out of my car at QuikTrip for coffee it takes EXACTLY 4 minutes until I am buckling my seatbelt getting back in. I know the breakdown of my runs to the mile.
The first three days of training camp were brutal for me. I had no schedule. I had no plan. I had no sense of what was coming next, only a vague idea of things that might happen based on videos that people watched in the airport as we were waiting for the shuttle to arrive. I trusted my team, but none of the A.I.M. staff. People never gave me a straight answer to my questions, just an airy encouragement to “go with the flow.” In the Falconer family, gate-keeping information is practically a sin, and not a little one either. It was infuriating. It was unsettling. It was exasperating.
It was necessary.
I’m reminded of a scene from Jurassic Park where Laura Dern is talking with Richard Attenborough, and as he tells her that he wanted to create something authentic., she yells at him “You never had control, that’s the illusion!”
That version of my life only works in North America within a very narrowly defined set of parameters. And while I know that God can and does work within those parameters – you wouldn’t believe the things that happen when He tells me to pull over to the side of the road to talk to someone – I can also see in retrospect the need to break that sense of control in me. If I’m running the show, it means that God isn’t.
The amazing thing that came out of this week as time went on was an incredible amount of vulnerability and openness between my squad and I. The more I let go of my demanding need for control and let God take me where He wanted me, the more I began to understand myself and God in a whole new way, and the more I could begin to lean on Him the way I’m supposed to. God showed me myself this week, and it would never have happened if I hadn’t been forced into the position of letting go. The beauty of all that is that the more I let God be in charge, the more He used me in the lives of the people around me, and the more I could receive what they were giving. God’s purposes became the connector between us, not our own sense of what needed to happen. It was an amazing thing.
Having my own sense of structure completely derailed pushed me in a new way to be completely on God’s timetable. It allowed God to open me up and tinker around under the hood for a bit and focus on the things He wanted to focus on. It is not an overstatement when I say that the work God did in my heart and mind this week was life-changing. I will never be the same again; thankfully, this is not the end of the journey, this is just the first step down the road. God is firmly in the driver’s seat, and I am happy to say that I am not in control.
