Note: This is the thirteenth in a series of letters written for those living at the end of the age, whenever that comes in the next fifteen years or the next one hundred and fifty years. Once complete, I’ll combine them into a book. You can access the previous chapters here. If you are not already subscribed to this blog and want to ensure you don’t miss any, you can add your name here.
_________________________________
My life is a disaster. If it’s not car repair bills, it’s sick children or someone gossiping about me at work. Why does life have to be so difficult, especially since my husband passed away? I try to get God to fix things, so my life is smoother, but fail at it. What am I doing wrong?
Charmaine, 32-year-old accountant and single mom in Atlanta, GA
Dear Charmaine,
I’m so sorry your life feels so complicated; you are a single mom doing extraordinary things with your two delightful children. I’m sure you miss their dad every day. Sometimes life is like whack-a-mole, one thing after another. Honestly, however, feeling in control isn’t always the blessing it promises to be.
The most control I’ve ever had was walking onto a football field under the Friday night lights as the head official of a high school football game. That was one of the ways I paid for my university expenses. For the next two and half hours, my word was law. Every decision I made would be final as two teams battled each other. The coaches could yell all they wanted, but all the power was mine, and I loved it.
When you’re young, everyone else makes decisions for you—parents, teachers, coaches, employers, and older people. Part of the maturing process is to take increasing control over your own choices. In adulthood, depending on whether you’re an entrepreneur or an employee, a homeowner or a renter, chairperson or committee member, people seek out as much power as they can muster. Most divorces are not caused by disagreements over finances, sexual frequency, or other “irreconcilable differences”, but control. Who gets to make the decisions?
If growing to adulthood is about gaining control, I’ve learned that growing through adulthood is about letting go of the power you’ve gained for a greater good. Better opportunities present themselves when we are not manipulating others or trying to control every circumstance. A maturing marriage will learn to share power so that neither feels like the victim of the other.
So, Charmaine, you’re not doing anything wrong. Life in a broken world will confront us with a host of challenges. Riding the wind of the Spirit is not only about discerning his voice but also about surrendering to our circumstances, knowing he’s at work in them, too. To stay in control, you have to grip tightly and always be on guard; to flow with your circumstances only takes a submissive heart and a listening ear.
The calamities that befall us now can help shape us to live at the end of the age when our challenges will be beyond us all. You won’t be able to insure, buy, or pray your way out of them. We are already seeing major catastrophes that destroy lives and cost billions to pay for recovery. The things that need to happen to bring redemption’s story to its conclusion are not the things we would choose for ourselves. The only question is how will we live in light of them.
Power Isn’t All It’s Cracked up to Be
Those who have learned to give up control and entrust themselves to God’s care and keeping will be able to thrive in the difficult days to come.
In Revelation, John saw an innumerable multitude in white robes coming out of the tribulation, and one of the elders told him, “For the Lamb at the center of the throne will be their shepherd; he will lead them to springs of living water. And God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.” (Revelation 17:17)
Out of much suffering and struggle through the darkest pages of human history, they will arrive in the final Kingdom provided for and comforted, never to suffer again. To survive those days, they will need resilient trust in God that can take them through the darkest of circumstances, still leaning into his care and voice, especially when it disappoints their most ardent expectations.
Those who do will have to let go of the need to control their circumstances and rely on the guidance of Jesus through their fears. We dare not be like the three-year-old toddler who cries when he doesn’t get what he wants instead of learning the ways of his parents, which would be for his own good. Besides, the people who fight for control are rarely pleasant people to be around. They are like that three-year-old, serving their own needs at the expense of everyone else around them and fraught with frustration and anger.
In my younger days, when I still fought for control, I mistakenly believed prayer was the ultimate weapon for gaining it. You can’t do better than enlisting God’s power to get what we think we need or thwart anyone trying to derail you. I would quote Bible verses about God’s ability to do anything and pray endlessly for what I wanted. It doesn’t take long to realize that prayer is not for meeting our control needs when our unanswered requests start piling up.
“Even though I walk through the darkest valley, I will fear no evil, for you are with me.” (Psalm 23:4) David knew that God rarely wants to do away with the valley but to walk with us through it. The time and energy we waste attempting to use prayer to leverage control of our lives is astounding. I’ve known people to pray in mortuary freezers for multiple weeks, just certain God is going to raise their loved one from the dead. Can God do such things? Of course he can, but our attempts to get him to do it at our whim will waste time and energy that would be better put toward learning to lay down our lives in love.
We live in the chaos of an ever-darkening world, and calamity falls on the just and the unjust. We cannot wish it away or even pray it away, but we can come to rest in our circumstances as we ask Jesus to help us navigate them.
The Great Illusion
I found it much easier to give up control when I realized it was only an illusion, and what drove me to seek control was my lack of trust in my Father’s work. No matter what dangers you can mitigate by whatever power you gain, you can’t get them all. Who would have thought four months ago that I would need back surgery and, barring healing, have to navigate cancer for the rest of my life?
As powerful as I felt walking onto that football field, I was still at the mercy of the weather and the cooperation of the players and coaches. In recent weeks, there have been many people in Los Angeles whose futures have been decimated by the wind and wildfires that destroyed their homes and neighborhoods. No amount of planning or power could stop what had happened. Yes, you can manipulate some circumstances and people, but not all of them, and trying to do so is not how we follow Jesus.
The desire for control is mainly driven by fear, fear we’re not enough, fear that we’ll have to suffer, and fear that God won’t take care of us. If fear is the opposite of love, as I said in the last chapter, then we would instead go where love leads us and not where fear does. You cannot love someone you are trying to control, even if you convince yourself you’re only looking for their best interests.
It isn’t easy to give up our fears, but that is where love can help us most. Whatever I fear, I need only ask, “What is it about your love, Father, that I don’t understand, and if I did, I would not be afraid. Ultimately, giving up control, or our illusion of control, is about finding freedom from our fears inside his love.
Without giving Sara all the power over the future of our marriage when her trauma exploded, I would not be inside her healing today. Or, If I had tried to take back my position with the institutional power I had when my co-pastor betrayed me, many people would have gotten hurt, and I wouldn’t have come to know the truth about God’s love that I know today. That’s why community is rare in religious settings because people often fight over power instead of loving each other.
But let me be extra careful with those of you who have significant, unresolved trauma in your past. You’ll know because you’re afraid of every potential threat. Your amygdala lights up and triggers responses to try to take back control of the situation, even when there is no need to. Asking people like that to give up control is like asking a bird not to sing. You’ll never be able to give up control until you first let Jesus process your trauma with you. Until Jesus disarms the fears that drive your need to control others, you won’t be able to let go of the control you think you need.
Jesus’s Passion
The best example of someone giving up control is Jesus himself. That might have been what his gut-wrenching prayers did in Gethsemane that night. He had to let go of his desire to control the situation coming at him and be at rest enough to follow God’s heart through his anguish for the next day. Remember, Jesus had the power to stop it all at any point.
Giving up the desire to control what we can has to begin with the same kind of honest, raw, and submissive prayer Jesus offered in the Garden. “My Father, if it is possible, may this cup be taken from me. Yet not as I will, but as you will.” (Matthew 26:39) He was honest about his reluctance to follow God through all the suffering that lay ahead for him, though he was never deterred from the result. He wanted to find another way to our redemption, but in the end surrendered to the way it had to be.
That’s the reason Jesus told us to deny ourselves. He wasn’t encouraging an ascetic lifestyle of self-denial but warning us that if our foremost desire is to have what we want we’ll get caught up in the mistaken notion that our business is the Father’s business. When we are no longer resisting our circumstances, it is easier to discern God’s will in them.
That night Jesus gave himself over to the disciple who would betray him to the others, who would flee from him to the religious leaders, who would lie about him to Pilate, who would make him a pawn in his political games, and to the soldiers who would beat him and then execute him. Choosing not to resist any of it, he found a Father big enough to hold him through it.
There’s something strangely liberating about not having to resist the painful circumstances that befall us. Trying to change our circumstances when God is at work in them will frustrate us with questions about how hard or how often we need to pray. Letting God walk you through dark circumstances allows all of his goodness to be in play, and when it serves him to change them, he can let us know.
Sometimes the greatest act of love is to stop fighting, surrender to your circumstance, and see what God wants to do. Persevering in prayer is something Scripture encourages us to do, but not when our desires conflict with his. The time and energy we waste trying to change our circumstances when he is not in it would be better used to grow our trust.
Navigating Without Control
In learning to give up control, I have found these ideas helpful. Perhaps they will be so for you as well.
1. Just because you can doesn’t mean you should. Jesus could have called a legion of angels to avoid going to the cross. Imagine if he had! When we live by control, we always do what we can to get our way and miss so much that God wants to do in the things we resist. This is where we need to be led by his Spirit rather than by our fears and doubts.
2. Just because God can doesn’t mean he will. Prayer needs to focus on God’s activity far more than our desires. Jesus only did the things he saw his Father doing.
3. Don’t make it about yourself. Self-centric thinking is a death-knell to being available to the work of the Spirit. My friend Luis had a dream one night with Jesus and him talking on a park bench. Jesus asked him if he knew why Jonah did what he did. Thinking for a moment, Luis responded that his fear of the Assyrians listening to him and repenting was more than he could bear. He wanted them destroyed, so he ran.
Then Luis realized he was talking to Jesus, so he asked why Jonah did what he did. What Jesus said next in the dream is the best commentary I’ve ever heard on the book of Jonah, and it is in five words: “He made it about himself.”
Just hearing those words gives me chills. How often have I made it about myself and shaped my prayers and efforts around that? Luis and I stood at a wedding not long after watching the family drama around who would do what at the wedding. Tempers were flaring, and tension was rising. We just sat back and watched. They were making it about themselves when the bride and groom were all that mattered.
4. How can I not make it about myself? Follow what love brings, not fear. It’s hard, I know. Love whispers to us; fear has a megaphone and blasts its agenda in both ears. Quiet yourself in his love and follow that.
5. Ask yourself, what is God saying/doing in this? Is there a higher redemptive purpose here than my comfort or getting my way? My rule of thumb is this: when I don’t know, I surrender to my circumstances, looking for God to give me the wisdom and courage to face them. In other words, he doesn’t have to show me my need to submit to them because that’s my default. If he wants to change them, he can show me that, too.
6. If you’ve resisted some circumstances through effort or prayer, and they persist, then you know God is using them. When I was first diagnosed with cancer, Jesus and I spoke about it often. I’d love for him to heal it without medicine, but despite my prayers and those of hundreds of others, it hasn’t happened. So, I stopped trying to get God to heal me and asked him how he wanted me to walk through the difficult process doctors are using to put it in remission. I use my strength there rather than constantly second-guessing how I should pray.
Letting go of the need to control is not to become a victim of circumstance. It’s quite the opposite; riding the winds of circumstance is how we find victory over them and watch God work in them for his glory.
Out of Weakness… Strength
Paul tried to get Jesus to stop a messenger from Satan who harassed him and his ministry. He begged for it to be taken away three times but with no success. Then Jesus told him, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.”
So, Paul concludes, “For Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong.” That’s someone riding the wind of circumstances instead of being conflicted by them.
The secret to following Jesus comes by recognizing he works out of our weakness more than our strengths. His strength comes in the midst of the things we beg him to remove. But it is in those times when we are beyond our limit that he appears to do his greatest work in us.
The more we resist our circumstances, the more they own us and the less focused we will be on what God is doing in them.
