A New Book , An Invitation
“Make a fist” the nurse tells me as she ties the rubber strap tight around my upper arm. “Squeeze your hand shut, then open it again, then squeeze it again.” A feeling of conviction swirled with resignation, twinges in my gut. This posture is as familiar to me as breathing. I know all about squeezing my hands shut.
I squeeze my fingers against my palms.
“Exhale when you open your fist,” she says, and I do.
I hold back a quiet sob. Not because of her probing with the needle, but because God regularly shows up in moments like this, whispering spiritual metaphors into these everyday things that don’t seem related to what’s going on inside.
I live with an autoimmune disease that requires me to undergo regular blood draws in order to check the levels of certain antibodies in my blood. I always face the needle with dread because rather than bleed freely when stuck, my small veins roll, blow, or my blood dribbles out so slowly, that the cells break down, making whatever is collected in the vile, unusable. My flesh is uncooperative.
The problem with my veins is physiological but the irony of this struggle is not lost on me. The spiritual battle my soul wages with surrender is played out in this regular bodily act of defiance. My struggle to let go is literally in my veins.
Flexing my hands open and closed, God is so present. I want to ask the nurse if she feels what I feel in that moment. I want to ask her if she feels both fully seen, faults and all, and held close, at the same time. I wonder if she feels the strange mingling of grief and joy that comes with struggling towards surrender. I don’t say anything to her. I squeeze my hands open and shut, and I breathe. She watches my face like she’s trying to discern how much of her poking around I’ll tolerate before I scream, uncle! But in that moment, I don’t feel her probing. I’m too distracted by the sensation of God’s nearness in that small exam room.
One of the surprise gifts of surrender is God’s constant love and comfort in the struggle. I get so tired of myself that sometimes, I imagine that God must be weary of me too. Of course, this is not the case at all. I’ve tested God’s patience my entire life and found Him to be inexhaustible. My struggle to bend my knees is not too wearisome for Him, which is of course, grace, because this journey has been a long one—and I am not done. I have not arrived.
Five years ago, I got hung up on Romans 12:1, which says, “present your bodies as a living sacrifice holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship” I don’t know how many times I read and re-read that passage asking God, what exactly does this mean, and how exactly is one to do such a thing? Not surprisingly, God didn’t answer me with words. Instead, He would teach me what it meant.
In his letter to the Romans, Paul says that this sacrificial living, is what worship is intended to look like. This is how our hearts become conformed to the image of Christ. This is what becoming a “new creation” looks like—a soul willing to lay aside its own desires and wants for Christ’s sake, and for the sake of the whole Body.
To sacrifice something means, “to surrender something prized or desirable for the sake of something considered as having a higher or more pressing claim” (Dictionary.com).
For those of us prone to forget (ahem), that the world doesn’t actually revolve around us, if we will practice it, this surrender reorients our lives. For those of us who have a tendency towards living with closed hands, learning to live a posture of surrender keeps God at the center of our story—which is His right and proper place. It teaches us to relax our grip, and learn to trust that God is holding it all—and that we don’t have to. This is a call to dedicate our entirety to God, not just once, but daily. This is our ongoing worship.
In the time spent learning-by-living this message, and trying to put words around the experience, I was told by experts in publishing that this message was difficult to package neatly for readers. I was told that it was hard—maybe too hard. And I knew they were right because there has been nothing glamorous or easy about the sacrifices God continues asking me to make. A living sacrifice doesn’t die once—it keeps dying, again and again, because every small death is refining. Every surrender is transformational. This is how we are made new. This is, to borrow a phrase from Bonhoeffer, the unavoidable cost of discipleship.
Against the wisdom of those in the know, I wrote this book anyway. Despite my best efforts to convince God that I should write something else, God did not give me another message. Instead, this message only burned hotter in my heart.
And then, I stopped trying to outrun it. I surrendered, butt-in-chair, and wrote the words I’d been trying so hard not to write.
It was so hard but even when surrender feels like the hardest thing, is always the doorway to freedom. Always.
When we say yes to God, we are released from the burden of perfection and even from the outcome. When we stop working so hard in our own effort, and hand over to God, the part of our lives—everything—that He’s asking for, we can step out from beneath the pressure to succeed or achieve or accomplish or produce. In surrender like this, we learn to trust that God’s purposes may not look like the same one’s we had in mind, but that His ways are always better.
Always.
None of the visions I entertained about what it would look like at long last, to share this book with the world included a pandemic. Never in our lifetime, have any of us ever faced such a season of surrender, as we are living now. All of the predictions and models out there for what comes next, cannot predict how we will ultimately be shaped by the kinds of sacrifices we are being asked and in some cases, forced, to make. We will be changed by this. Surrender always changes us.
Ultimately, the question before us is will we let God all the way in? Will we give Him everything—all of ourselves?
This is not a once-and-for all question. This is the question we must ask ourselves every day, in every situation, mood and experience. This is the question we get to answer with our lives. This is His invitation.
Will we not do it?
How difficult and painful it is to lay our treasures down at the foot of the cross, and how bright and beautiful it is to find joy beyond the clenching of fists. We do not have to come to surrender in any other way than as we are.
I wrote this book because I felt utterly compelled to do so. I wrote it for myself, because I need the reminder every day, that surrender is not a bad word, that it’s worth it, that it is where I can be closest to God. And I wrote it for you, because I know I’m not the only one who struggles to let God all the way in. I know I’m not the only one who habitually withholds parts of my life from God. My prayer is that you will find grace in these pages. That you will find a friend in the trenches, who “gets it”—who knows how hard it is to give God everything, and encourages you to do it anyway.
Everything Is Yours, How Giving God Your Whole Heart Changes Your Whole Life, is available wherever books are sold.
AND
For a limited time, I am opening up my upcoming online book club for FREE until April 30. The online book study begins May 1st. This will be a 5-week deep-dive into the book. Part bible study, part book study, we will work through the questions and obstacles we face in learning to surrender. Register HERE to participate.