Today the Middle School Youth Group leaves for their weekend retreat. This year’s theme is “Surrendering to God.” Surrender isn’t a word we tend to use very often. What’s your first thought on hearing the phrase “surrender to God”? And once you get past the first thought, what’s one way you can maybe “give in” to God a little this weekend?
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The word surrender is a powerful and positive word for me. It reminds me of that initial decision to take Christ as my “Lord and Savior.” I don’t know if I really appreciated what that meant for my life at the time that I first used the phrase. As a matter of fact, I am positive that I really did not know what it meant. I can say that because in the roughly 50 years since I first used those words, I have discovered that proclaiming Christ as my Lord and Savior is a lot more than I thought. First of all, it is not a singular event that happens at a particular time and place. For me, surrender to the faith that Jesus is my Lord and Savior is surrender to the fact that I am not in control of what happens in my life. It is sort of like that old expression: “Life is what happens when you are planning something else.” Every day new things come my way. Even though I have been doing the same kind of work for over three decades, every single day presents new opportunities and new decision points where I can do things MY way, or I can stop focusing on what my way is and really listen and look at what is going on around me and respond to it with integrity, truth, caring. It is similar to what psychologists talk about when they talk about “active listening.” A non-active listener “hears” what the other person is saying, but while they are “hearing” they are actually thinking about what their response is going to be. An active listener “hears” the audible sounds the other person is saying, but then goes beyond that to think about what the person really means and intends by their words. You can only think about the other’s meaning, if you DON’T think about what your response will be.
Now if we apply that concept to our relationship with God, it means that as I am going through my day, I am trying to “hear” what God is saying to me in the opportunities that the day presents me. I am not just thinking about what my own thoughts, my own agendas, my own desires are. I am not manipulating events in such a way as to turn them to my advantage. Instead, I am taking each event as it comes, looking for Gods direction that is embedded in that event and then responding to God’s direction, instead of my own direction (the one that I would like to impose on the situation because it serves my agenda). If I approach my day in this way, every day will provide an opportunity, perhaps many opportunities, to surrender; to surrender my agenda and truly listen to and respond to what is going on around me.
Does this actually make any sense?