Surrendering to the River
Last week I talked about God’s call for Christians to surrender to the river of God.
Surrender is extremely counter-intuitive and counter-cultural. The American culture is obsessed with success. We focus on the good fight and value endurance, tenacity, strength and ultimately the accomplishment of our objectives especially when it is against the odds. We celebrate these values with slogans like “never give up” and “die trying”. Success in our careers is often the measure of our worth to ourselves and our families as well as society.
Through this lens, it makes no sense for God to ask us to surrender. If God really loves us, doesn’t God want us to succeed? If God really loves us, how could God allow us to fail? This thinking leads us down unhelpful paths. We wonder if our failures are punishment for unfaithfulness or inadequate prayer or sacrifice. When we go down this road we begin to worship God the way ancient people’s worshiped the golden calf. We imagine success as something God allows or not, or perhaps something God ensures or not.
Like many Americans, I dedicated myself to my professions. I had a family whom I loved, but if I’m honest, unless there was a crisis, work generally came first. I was caught up in the American Dream and the idea of professional success (i.e. making my mark on the world). My prayers asked God to help me do God’s will and help me accomplish things for God. These are well-intentioned prayers that I’m sure God welcomed. But they kept me in the driver’s seat and they kept God at a distance.
My relationship with God was about negotiating. If I do these things (go to church, pray, tithe, do good works), I will be rewarded in my life by success (in family, career, etc.). When God becomes a tool for our success, we have made success itself our god.
Surrendering to God is about letting go of our ideas about God and our expectations of God to make things the way we want them.
When we surrender, we admit that we don’t have the answers and that we do not have what it takes to follow God, even though our intentions are good. When we surrender we also admit that we don’t actually have what it takes to be successful or we accept that our experience of success falls short of the joy we hoped it would bring. When we surrender, we are not simply hanging our head before God in hopes of help. We are letting go go of both the goals that have driven us to this point and our ideas about God’s role in attaining those goals. Indeed we are letting go of the very things we once held most dear. It is extremely difficult and simply unthinkable to most people until they have no other choice.
Surrender usually begins with a confession. We confess to how we have followed our own hearts - often in God’s name. But it doesn’t end there. Surrender means waiting on the Lord. We let go of our ambitions and wait. We wait to see what God does next and we follow wherever that leads.
Typically when we surrender, God doesn’t jump in immediately with instructions or solutions. Rather, God lets us sit there for a while. It takes time for us to let go of our own agendas and expectations. We keep picking them back up and trying to bargain with God some more, or when we think we feel God stir, we pick up where we left off assuming God has blessed our ideas. Most of us have to sit alone with ourselves and our broken hopes long enough to accept the truth - that we are not in fact in control and we can not bend the world to our will. Only then will we be open to really hearing God.
This is not something God does to us. It is something we are doing to ourselves. Until we let go of our ideas about God, we will not actually come to know God.
But as we do let go, we will find that our eyes open slowly to God’s genuine presence. God feeds us mercy and love in small bites like an infant learning to eat cereal on a spoon. As St. Paul says, “I gave you milk, not solid food, for you were not yet ready for it. Indeed you are still not ready.” 1 Cor 3:2
If you are in a place where you are ready to surrender to God, be patient with yourself and God. It is okay to simply sit and wait on the Lord. It is okay to lay out your sorrows and cry and cry. This time is necessary for our own healing. God will show up… just not on your schedule. God waits until you put down your demands so that you can be truly receptive to God.
