When I became a parent for the first time, I didn’t know what I had gotten myself into. On one particular day, my son, just a few weeks old at the time, had fallen asleep on my chest.
I thought I would be really slick and slide out my phone to scroll Instagram before I put him in his crib. I got my phone out of my pocket and settled into a comfortable position without waking my boy. Score one for dad!
However, I had been using my phone for just a few minutes when I suddenly lost my grip. Before I could stop gravity, the phone fell straight down onto my baby boy’s forehead. Smack! Instantly, he awoke and began crying. (This parenting thing was going to be harder than I expected.)
My wife ran into the room, and her first words were, “What did you do?!” Offended that she immediately accused me of wrong, I thought about (I’m being honest here) telling a lie. I couldn’t, so I said, “I dropped my phone on his forehead while he was sleeping.” Several years later, I’ve yet to live it down with her. My son now knows the story, and even he won’t let me live it down.
Dangerous Expectations
Parenting has been much harder than I expected, and it has revealed my flaws more than I anticipated. It’s one area of my life where I’ve had to wrestle with the gap between my expectations and reality.
Anne Lamott once wrote, “Expectations are resentments under construction.” Harsh words, but they’re true. Few of us had any idea were “constructing resentments” earlier this year when we started dreaming, planning, and preparing for a very different spring (or summer) than we have now experienced.
One of the hardest parts of living through a time defined by COVID-19 is the feeling of being out of control. None of us like the feeling of being powerless. I’ve learned that we cannot control our experiences, but we can adjust and even surrender our expectations.
Many of my conflicts with my family and co-workers, along with my internal battles, have been the result of unrealistic, unspoken, and unyielded expectations. When I continue to hold on to expectations of what I thought would be, and I fight against what is now my reality, I cause grief and pain for myself and those around me. A healthy, life-giving response to the unexpected changes to our lives in 2020 includes releasing our expectations.
As I’ve been challenged to surrender my expectations, I’ve discovered some unexpected truths about surrender.
5 Surprising Dynamics of Surrender
1. Surrender is a four-letter word to our culture.
In our world, surrender is used to describe giving up in battle or the condition of someone unable to beat an illness. Our response to the idea of surrender is often revulsion and rejection.
But surrender is a fundamental part of God’s vocabulary. Our relationship with God is not built on our control; it’s built on our surrender and trust.
When God’s people surrender to God’s agenda, it doesn’t always go the way they planned. Surrender does not lead to immunity, unlimited financial prosperity, and ease. But, Psalm 37:25 reminds us of God’s promise to the surrendered. David wrote, “Once I was young, and now I am old. Yet I have never seen the godly abandoned or their children begging for bread.”
2. Surrender reflects trust.
None of us willingly surrender something to someone we don’t trust, including God. Our trust in God ends where our fear to surrender control begins. Personally, I’ve found the edges where God wants to expand my trust by increasing my surrender. I feel like the man who spoke to Jesus in Mark 9:24, saying, “I do believe, but help me overcome my unbelief.” Instead, I’m saying, “I trust you God; help my fear of trust.”
3. Surrender is both an event and a process.
In Romans 12:1, the Apostle Paul writes, “And so, dear brothers and sisters, I plead with you to give your bodies to God because of all he has done for you. Let them be a living and holy sacrifice—the kind he will find acceptable. This is truly the way to worship him.”
There’s an old preacher joke about living sacrifices. The joke goes like this - the problem with living sacrifices is they can decide to crawl off the altar. While the joke is over-used, it reflects the truth of the following verse. In verse 2, Paul calls us to not “copy the behavior and customs of this world, but let God transform you into a new person by changing the way you think.”
God’s transformation in us is both an event and a process, and our surrender to that transformation is an event and a process too.
4. Surrender is not weakness; it’s the path to strength.
In 2 Corinthians 12, Paul wrote, “That’s why I take pleasure in my weaknesses, and in the insults, hardships, persecutions, and troubles that I suffer for Christ. For when I am weak, then I am strong.” When we face weakness, such as the inability to make our experience reflect our expectations, we have the option of being resentful or seeking to assert more control. The other option is to surrender to what God is doing and discover His strength where all we once knew was our weakness.
5. Surrender brings freedom.
Galatians 5 begins with a reminder and a warning. “Christ has truly set us free. Now make sure that you stay free.”Freedom is not found in our efforts and our control." That’s the path of the law and self-righteousness. As Carlos Whittaker has written,
“Freedom doesn’t come in striving; freedom comes in surrender.”
This spring may have revealed where you have unmet expectations and strongholds where you’re holding out for sustained control. Instead of allowing those to become resentments or places for spiritual attack, you can surrender these to Jesus and trust Him for a different experience than you were planning.
If you are ready to surrender today or you need help developing a spirit of surrender, you may find this prayer exercise below helpful. By leading you through a physical act of releasing your expectations and receiving God’s provision for your needs, you can move surrender from an idea in your head to an ongoing practice in your life with God.
