Move your heart closer and closer to God, and he will come even closer to you.

James 4:8 (Passion Translation)

To God – Part 2

Go to PART 1

(Today’s artwork is supplied by my dear friend, Susanna April. She is a beautiful person and a wonderful letterist. Check her out at susannaapril.com)

Surrender gets the blame for a lot of misplaced faith. When someone dies, or someone is hurt, or something doesn’t go according to plan, we blame it on faith – “It must have been God’s timing (we wrote a series on timing in July, check it out), God knows what he’s doing… etc etc” Although, for me, these statements come up more often when the situation is somewhat emotionally removed from me – when I'm in the thick of it, they sound a lot different.

Then, (and the more tricky one to write about) we use faith and surrender as a means to keep our prejudices. (Did that hurt you as it hurt me? ouch!). If we surrender to God and resist the devil, it must mean that we reject them and them, and those people, and those people again.

The Message Bible interprets James 4:7-8 as, “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.”

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; 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. They want problems solved and someone to pay for what goes wrong. Surrender understands that grace prevails, and even though we might not ever be able to understand, or might not ever see justice or the problem may not be completely solved in our lifetime, we can experience peace in the midst of it all.

Surrender leads you through the challenges and successes of life on a higher road where you walk through your experiences and learn from them. 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.

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.

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.

These last two weeks, being plagued with sickness, I could have thrown a spiritual tantrum and hated the sickness. 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 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. (selah…). But what if we fought it 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 your way through me?” Breathe them in, soak up all it can give you, and then, when the time comes, breathe it out.

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

Go to Part 3 – Every Prayer

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