Surrender

You know, it’s a relief to surrender your life to God. Have you noticed how difficult it is to retain control of your life? It’s as if the more you try to control it, the harder it gets to do. When you surrender your self to God, you experience a great sense of relief at not having to control anything anymore.

I think we’d all admit that you can’t control tsunamis or floods or earthquakes or that kind of natural disaster, but for the life-sized stuff, we try and try more each year to control our families, our workplaces and everything that we feel impinges on us. Somehow our reasoning goes like this: “If I can just get my spouse or my kids or my boss or myself to do what I want them to do, then I will be fine.”

So we manipulate or confront or twist things just so they’ll be how we want. But people are not so pliable that they just exist to please us. Each of them is also trying to do the same thing, manipulating life so as to meet their own agenda.

Wait a second! If all of us are playing the same game, who could possibly win? No one. And we’re all unhappy because we can’t get what we want.

Surrendering gets us out of this dilemma. First of all it acknowledges that life is not controllable. Second, that there is an intelligence, a presence out there that has more wisdom than we do. Third, that this intelligence which you can call God, Mother or Father, Source, Creator, Christ, or Holy Spirit, has our best interests at heart and knows how to get for us what we need. Fourth, surrender takes us out of the rat race and into the life for which we’ve been designed.

Surrender means giving up the fight, laying down our weapons, against our spouses, our kids, our bosses and most of all ourselves. It’s the end of the war within. It’s giving up in hopes of finding a better way, once we realize that the old way, fighting reality, doesn’t work for us. What happens to a relationship when you don’t fight back? What changes with your kids if you don’t respond to their manipulations, but just state the truth of what you will or won’t do? And with yourself, what happens when you no longer pitch battles against new ideas or directions, when you embrace all that you are, when you listen to your deepest self?

All these are the result of surrendering your life. There is a palpable peace, an enrichment as you turn away from fighting and turn towards embracing the life, the spouse, the kids and the boss that you have. There is gratitude, there is love, there is forgiveness.