True Surrender

For as long as I can remember, I’ve surrendered to circumstances. To feelings of inadequacy, brokenness, exhaustion, sadness and failure. Over time it became easy, it became comfortable. It stopped feeling like something I was experiencing and started feeling like who I was.

It became my story.

This kind of surrender aligns with the definition of giving oneself over to a particular influence or emotion. While it might sound harmless, it’s anything but.

This form of surrender is virulent and strangely addictive.

I know you’re thinking, how can one become addicted to something toxic? The answer is simple and unsettling. The toxic patterns are familiar. They remove responsibility. They numb discomfort and dull hope. When you surrender to brokenness long enough, it stops hurting and starts to feel safe. Pain you expect feels more controllable than healing you don’t trust, and coming from a girl who thrives on control, it also becomes easy.

It protected me from disappointment, from accountability, from change, AND from God’s expectations (ouch).

As long as I stayed broken, I didn’t have to risk hope.

As long as I stayed tired, I didn’t have to try.

As long as I stayed small, I could avoid the weight of becoming someone new. Surrendering to dysfunction felt easier than surrendering to transformation.

What’s changed, and how did I arrive at true Surrender?

True surrender didn’t mean I was losing control. It was admitting I never had it, and choosing to place it in the hands of the one who has always had it. The one whose track record is perfect.

The surrender I once practiced required nothing of me. It allowed me to stay stagnant, in what I felt like was protection, and ultimately unchanged.

True surrender asks everything and requires some things. Not because God wants to take from us, but because he wants to free us. Free us from suffering we create.

I had to learn the difference between giving up out of fear, and laying things down at his feet, in faith. One left me stuck, while the other is teaching me how to live.

If your surrender isn’t freeing you, it isn’t true surrender. What have you been clinging to instead?