Why letting go of my own way may be one of the hardest—and most necessary—parts of Christian life.
I sometimes think life is painful for a very simple reason:
I keep trying to hold on to the very self I am eventually called to surrender to God.
My opinions.
My stubbornness.
My prejudices.
My convictions.
My habits.
My way of seeing the world.
The things I have gathered over the years and quietly begun to call mine. As long as I refuse to loosen my grip on them, life will inevitably involve a certain kind of pain. Because giving up what I have spent years claiming as my own rarely comes easily.
The Pain of Not Getting My Own Way
A life lived entirely on my own terms can look wonderfully free. There is something appealing about being a person who knows what she wants, makes her own decisions, and refuses to be swayed. From the outside, that kind of life can even look admirable. But spiritually, I wonder how useful it really is.
The Christian life is not ultimately about becoming better at getting my own way. It is about learning when to lay my own way down. That does not mean becoming passive, thoughtless, or incapable of conviction. It means learning that even my strongest convictions cannot sit on the throne. At some point, faith asks me to surrender not only the things I know are wrong, but also the things I am most convinced are right. That may be harder. Sin is one thing to give up. My certainty that I know best is another.
C.S. Lewis and the Problem of the Will
I return to C.S. Lewis’s The Problem of Pain often, and somehow it feels different every time I read it. Lewis uses striking language when he writes about the human will and the necessity of learning that we cannot simply have our own way. His discussion of children and the formation of the will can sound severe to modern ears. And I think it is language that could be badly misunderstood—or badly used—if “breaking the will” were taken to mean breaking a child’s spirit, personality, or sense of safety. That is not the lesson I want to take from it. For me, the deeper question is this:
How do we learn that our own will cannot always be the final authority?
And for Christians, that question goes even further.
How do I learn to yield my will to God?
How do I learn to depend on Him rather than treating Him as someone who should bless the life I have already designed for myself?
Perhaps Christian maturity is, in part, learning the difference between having a will and worshiping it.
When Obedience Costs Me Something
It is easy to speak about surrender when God’s will happens to line up with mine. It becomes much harder when it does not.
When the answer is not the one I wanted.
When the timing is wrong.
When the door stays closed.
When life refuses to fall into place.
That is when I discover how tightly I have been holding on.
I have written before about how easily disobedience can dress itself up in religious language. King Saul believed he had obeyed God even while defending the parts of God’s command he had chosen to ignore. The same temptation lives much closer to home than I would like to admit.
Sometimes what I call discernment is simply preference.
What I call conviction may be stubbornness.
What I call faithfulness may be my refusal to let go.
And perhaps one of the hardest forms of obedience is simply admitting:
This is what I want. But if God’s will is different, I am willing to let mine go.
What I Want My Children to Learn
Becoming a parent has made this question more complicated.
How do I teach my children that life will not always bend to their wishes without teaching them that their wishes do not matter?
How do I let them become strong people without teaching them that strength means always getting their way?
How do I teach surrender without crushing initiative?
Obedience without fear?
Humility without shame?
I find myself thinking about this more and more. Because sooner or later, they will discover that life does not move according to their timetable.
People will disappoint them.
Plans will fail.
Doors will close.
Their bodies will have limits.
Their abilities will have limits.
Other people will have wills of their own.
And there will be moments when no amount of effort can make the world cooperate.
I cannot spare them from that. Nor, I think, should I.
What I hope I can give them is a way to live inside that reality without being destroyed by it.
To know that not getting what they want is not the same as losing themselves.
To know that yielding is not always weakness.
To know that dependence is not humiliation.
And, above all, to know that there is Someone they can depend on when their own will reaches its limit.
The Freedom of Letting Go
Perhaps this is something I am still learning alongside them. The more quickly I understand that life will not always go according to my plans, the less violently I have to fight reality every time it does not. And perhaps the Christian life becomes less painful—not because life itself becomes easier, but because I finally stop demanding that everything submit to me.
There is a kind of freedom in realizing that I do not have to control everything about my life.
A freedom in saying:
I do not understand this.
I would not have chosen this.
This is not how I wanted it to go.
But I do not have to be God.
Maybe learning to surrender my will is not the loss of myself after all. Maybe it is the slow release of the exhausting illusion that my life was ever mine to control completely. And maybe the sooner I learn that, the less painful it will be to live.
