So let God work his will in you. Yell a loud no to the Devil and watch him scamper. Say a quiet yes to God and he’ll be there in no time. James 4:7-8 (MSG)

A Quiet Yes – The Surrender Series – Part 2

Go to PART 1  |  PART 2  |  PART 3  |  PART 4

That quiet ‘yes’ to God is what surrender feels like for me. It’s more a prayer. It’s breathing in and out with the rhythm of our lives. And saying no to the devil is less yelling, screaming, rebuking, taking stands and getting angry and rejecting those who aren’t the same as us; and more simply walking out of the room of hate, greed, malice, and even resistance itself; and walking through the door of surrender, and into the room of grace.

Surrender is anti-knee-jerk. It doesn’t lead to further resistance. It leads to peace. Our egos want tit-for-tat, eye for an eye. They want problems solved, answers explained, and someone to pay for what goes wrong. Surrender understands that grace prevails, and we can experience peace in the midst of it all.

Surrender leads you through the challenges and successes of life in such a way that you learn from them. Awake, aware, humble. You allow God, and everything that comes to you, to work their way into and through your life, and then in some instances, work their way out.

Jesse and I have had a rough couple of years (not with each other, with other stuff). We came up with a practice we do whenever we feel the heat of our situation rise in our hearts. We say to each other:

“Breathe it in, let it circle through the body, and then breathe it all the way out.”

Surrender is a prayer. It’s a quiet yes to the Divine. It’s steady breath in the midst of chaos. A movement from the room of the visceral to the wide open spaces of the eternal and spiritual. It doesn’t deny those feelings. But rather than surrendering to them, we surrender to the one who leads us through them in a way that brings healing and wholeness. A richer life.

(N.B.: easier said than done)

Sure, there are things to fight for. But the more I experience, and the more people I meet, the more I understand that the only thing worth fighting for is love. And the only way to fight for it is with love itself. And sometimes to love is the most courageous, gutsy and risky thing you can do.

Struggling with sickness, I could have thrown a spiritual tantrum, sprouted hate at the illness and my body. Instead, I tried to focus on love. I loved my body, I gave it rest. I spoke to it kindly. I respected the power of the illness and took the appropriate measures for it to work its way out of my body.

Darkness is powerful. If you don’t respect that it is so, it’s like playing with fire thinking you won’t get burned. We tend to fight darkness with darkness. But what if we fought our darkness with light and love? If we surrendered fully to the extravagant, furious, never-ending, relentless love of God and used it as a way to move forward? What if you said to your challenges, “I’m going to love you all the way through me?”

Breathe them in, soak up all they can give you, and then, when the time comes, breathe them all out.

All the while, saying that quiet ‘yes’ to God.

Go to Part 3 – Giving Up »

Written by Lizzy Milani
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