Surrender

When I was 18, somewhere around the the new year, I picked up Brother Lawrence’s Practicing the Presence of God at my local library. The little book stunned me; I had never heard someone talk about God’s presence with such tenderness and love. I had always sensed a harshness about God, probably a projection of my own inner-perfectionist, and had spent my life up until this point trying to be good. But Brother Lawrence didn’t seem to think that the heart of our stories with God were about being good. In fact, it seemed he didn’t even try to be good. It felt scandalous to read, and yet it was a balm to my heart, cracked open and arid and dry from trying too long to be good with no reservoir to pull from besides my own inner-workings. Instead of striving and trying, Brother Lawrence instead spoke about grace and love. It both baffled and soothed me.

I re-read that little book this year, over 13 years after I read it the first time, and once again I felt a longing for Brother Lawrence’s lifestyle. My view of surrender often comes back to a feeling of deep fear, of self-hatred and shame, and a need to grovel before God. Lawrence has a different vision: sit in God’s love, talk to God often, and do everything out of the joys of God’s grace. The problem for me, still, is the loss of control this involves. I loved control at 18, and I love control now. At 18, I wanted God to be clear about my vocation, about what I would study in college, about how to stop doing bad things. The questions haven’t changed that much at age 30. I want to know what’s next, how to make perfect choices that won’t mess up my future, how to get rid of the parts of me I don’t like. This is the headspace I am inclined toward and that, in my darker moments, gets the best of me. But it isn’t the way of Jesus. 

The hardest lesson I had to learn about my faith, right off the bat, was that I was not given control. “God must be totally in control,” writes Brother Lawrence, and I hated that. I fought God in those early years. I cursed and ripped holes in my prayer journal. I didn’t want rest. I didn’t want grace. Grace would force me to abandon every structure I had put in place in my life to hold everything together. If I chose to pursue grace instead of perfection, my whole life would come crashing down around me. I fought it with everything in me, and continued to for years. In many ways, my story up to this point can be summed up quite simply: Allowing grace to undo me. I feel it today, as I wake up completely unsure of myself, in a job I barely know how to do, and in a stage of life I feel ill-equipped to handle. The difference is that, this time, I know that grace is the better way. 

When I was 18, surrender felt like a death. That’s because it was. The me I had constructed, the religious, goody-two-shoes, straight-A student, had to die. The makeshift structures I had built for myself to live in needed to go, too. I hated this process. For those of us whose coping mechanisms make us look good in the sight of others, grace often feels like a demotion. It’s a lie, but I felt that way for a long time. I still have a hard time choosing grace over control, because it leaves me without the gold stars I so desperately crave. But it also leaves me without the stains I am always trying to rub off. With grace, nothing sticks – not the pats on the back, and not the critical, harsh feedback. With grace, we are called into deeper waters. It is a reckless, wonderful life that we never could have imagined – but it also requires our wholehearted consent to God. 

Around the same time I was reading Brother Lawrence’s book, I was also told by someone to ask God what his promise for my life was. I sat in silence on my bed, my lilac candle lit on my dresser, the golden and red walls of my room holding me in, and I asked God to speak. I felt God say that day - not audibly, but in my spirit - that his promise to me was a lush life. Nothing about my life at the time felt lush. I didn’t even know what that meant. But when I think now of the word surrender, one of my words for that messy year, I think of that promise. I think of how a loss of control doesn’t mean chaos – it means allowing God to do something we wouldn’t have thought possible. Surrender is vibrant – an entering into new life and fresh vision. Grace is infinite, Brother Lawrence writes. “The more we explore it, the more riches we find.” I couldn’t see it then, but I see it now. Surrender is the beginning of grace, the beginning of healing, the beginning of everything.