Friday, October 12, 2012

Surrendering to God instead - adapted from my FB note

It is so easy to surrender our lives to circumstances, feel defeated by the hard knocks we receive; but surrendering to God is so hard to do. We seem to prefer to surrender and cave in under pressure than to willingly give up our lives, our troubles and our frustrations to God. Why is that?
Is it because our egos are so big that if we fail, we just want to have the failures attributed to us? Or perhaps we just cannot give over the rein of life to the ONE driver who can get us to our destination safely?
It is so easy when we see others having problems to just say "Leave it to God. Remember Proverbs 3:5,6". Or God will not test you beyond what you can bear. Or what you face is common to man, God always gives you a way out. All these reassuring words, all from the word of God, can work wonders ... but can be very meaningless to the person saying them, because he/she doesn't know what it means to come to the state where one feels like there is no way out, when the point of desperation is so real and overwhelming. These can be just empty words.
So when this person himself/herself comes to the place where those very words can be uttered meaningfully to him/her, these words become empty words - because these words had never held true to him/her before. Because these words were merely words. Now, being on the receiving end of these reassuring and most beautiful words, he/she cannot understand them.
How sad it is then.
Instead of letting those words minister to the heart, some of us would rather let them pass, or escape to some corners of our minds and wallow in self-pity or focus only on ourselves, never on God.
How do we help someone like this?

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