I Do Not Think It Means What You Think It Means

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
~William Goldman | The Princess Bride

This quote has been rolling around in my head all week. It’s Holy week—and when this quote came to mind, I thought, this is a strange quote to be thinking on right now. Even so, it would not leave me.

For nearly all of my life, save the last ten or so years, I believed that surrender was a word for yellow-bellied quitters, cut from too-soft a cloth to be able to go the hard distance of life. By my estimation, the word surrender was a synonym for cowardice. It was forbidden. To surrender was a treasonous act against the human will to overcome.

The first time I noticed God speaking to me about my allegiance to this resistance to submission was in the early years of marriage. I heard His voice again in the tumultuous days of motherhood, as I struggled to bring my toddlers under my instruction. God spoke to me again about it when we decided to homeschool, when we bought a house, when we sold a house, when I stepped of my comfort zone to publish a book, to host a women’s retreat, when I spoke at conferences, and publish other work—and a thousand times in between all of these moments.

It seemed God and I were in constant conversation about this idea of surrender—a decades-long wrestling what I thought it meant, what it actually means, and what it looks like to learn to live it.

Present your bodies as a living sacrifice…(1)

I Do Not Think It Means What You Think It Means.

My misgivings about surrender have caused myself (and others, who I’d sometimes accused of being obstacles) undo harm, as I have fought tooth-and-nail to live my life, in my own strength.

**Likening surrender to failure, makes it near-impossible to release our white-knuckle grip on life, which is of course, exactly what the cross of Christ calls us to do.**

Before I could begin to understand what God was asking me to do, I had to come to understand that my life, isn’t really mine.

As created beings we don’t really belong to ourselves—no matter how much society tells us otherwise…We have been bought with a price (1 Corinthians 6:20) (2)

The paradox of this is, that the only way to really learn what it is to surrender is to do it. All of faith is an act of surrender. In faith, we submit our reasonable explanations to a belief that admits and confesses that things may be other than they appear.

Nothing affects our willingness to even be willing to surrender to God, like our belief about what we believe the word actually means.

Of course, other obstacles make the process difficult. Fear, doubt, distrust. We' know there is a cost. We know in our heads what the cross symbolizes. It’s our hearts that can’t fathom it. It’s our hearts that resist.

Surrender most assuredly means suffering. Who among us can say that we want that? Today is Good Friday, the hardest day of the Christian year. Today, we sit in the tension and grief of the most unimaginable surrender ever offered in the history of all of creation. The painful remembrance of this day makes it a difficult one to navigate. It’s tempting to numb ourselves to dull the pain. It’s tempting to sleep right through to Easter.

Good Friday is a wake- up call, forcefully reminding us that suffering and death are real, and that even the Son of God had to endure them. But Good Friday is also about our limited vision. (3)

When God invites us to open our hands to Him we’re tempted to look with our eyes at the landscape of what might be lost:

Friends

Family members

Respect

Jobs

Comfort

Present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. (4)

The price feels high. It most assuredly is. It will cost us everything. There’s no bargaining—it is a total sum equation. But our eyes betray us. In surrender, we gain immeasurably more than we lose. It is here, with our hearts open, that we gain the fullness of God within. The generosity of the Holy Spirit who makes His home IN us. By His own surrender to the cross, Christ freed us from sin, and in our surrender we embrace that freedom.