“Made a
decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.”
~Step 3, Twelve Steps Program
Recovery: the realness of it.
Emotional turmoil got us here,
into our present pain, and there is to be more emotional turmoil as we scratch at and
wrangle with this very pain. This is a battle.
Nothing will be harder; nothing.
Yet, nothing harder is made
easier, astoundingly so, by the grace of God availed to us by our surrender.
This availability needs to be
believed. Surrender makes it sure. We can reconcile all possible things if we
can achieve surrender—a thing so easy, yet paradoxically so very hard—and
recovery, a day at a time, even a moment, is made easier. It’s made possible.
Regarding something that feels impossible
to so many, it is now seen through different eyes. The experience is new.
Freshness breathes life into this possibility—through surrender is freedom.
Freedom Only Through Surrender
Surrender is the only way we can
manage, with good effect, these boiling emotions.
It’s the only way we can stand in
the presence of the impossible. But the trick is it needs to become habitual,
practiced to the point of clean availability, for the sneaky times of weakness
enrol us to temptation at the least expected moment.
These sneaky times of weakness,
for which were built for our surrender, are held at bay by the
admission of our incapacity. Only when we can admit we have no answer do we
climb upon the scaffolding of God to get us through.
God has given us weakness in order
to remind us of a power that beats it all—by being true in it. This is the vitality of surrender—that we
give up our false pretences and thought that we can manage without God. We
can’t.
The Centre And Very Purpose Of Surrender
The moment in life when we fall
upon a revelation—that we control hardly anything, and there is One who has
ultimate control—is the moment, with never more irony, that we sniff the
pleasing aroma of freedom. And this is the centre and very purpose of surrender.
To admit our powerlessness; to
acknowledge God’s all-encompassing power; to draw upon that Gap.
That Gap, which we sensed
beforehand as insurmountable, God fills. He fills it with divine grace which is
accessed, as a gift from God, by our surrender.
The Performance Of Surrender
Surrender doesn’t have to be
happiness, contented with its lot. No, it’s realer than that. It takes what
‘is’ as it is and has a mood about it that asks no more in that moment.
In that moment is the knowledge of
God.
***
The biggest paradox known to life
is power—how ours is so limited, yet God’s is so infinite. When we learn that
surrender is the key to tapping into the power of God our problems, and our
recovery, are made easier; even possible when they seemed so impossible.
© 2012 S. J. Wickham.
While the acceptance of a Saviour who died on a cross for us is an easy option, ( if not a scapegoat approach ), for so many Christians it is the only 'picture' of surrender. Few will appear to acknowledge that, as you so rightly point out, surrender is in the everyday ups and downs of life. We live in a culture where to admit to being powerless is seen only as the ultimate weakness - to be avoided at all costs. Blessed are the meek springs to mind.
ReplyDeleteGraham
Yes, that's a very human default, Graham, and one, I agree that's reinforced by our modern culture. But, perhaps we've always struggled.
ReplyDelete