Let it go...
That was the message, the challenge of the youth musical this morning. It's such a simple little message. "Let go and let God" has been a popular and oft quoted little sentence in my life already, and I have known for a long time that the concept of surrender is one of my greatest struggles.
Someone I love, admire, and respect once made a demonstration of surrender for a group of people, believers and not, by simply holding her hands in fists and opening them to let go of the things she's been holding onto too tightly. I have often thought about that simple action and have participated in the symbolism of it many times since, singing in worship, making fists as tight as I can make them until they hurt and then opening up my fingers, turning my palms downward and then upward to let go of what I'm holding, to make room for what I desperately need to receive.
Let it go...
As soon as I entered the sanctuary and was reminded of this morning's theme, I was eager to hear the message, one I need every morning, every day. Let it go... Truly open up your hands and let it go...
At the end of the service, as I went to the front of the room to write down what I was letting go, my testimony on a piece of cardboard, I shook taking the the cap off the marker and wrote furiously, quickly, in the the crooked scrawl handwriting I resort to in a rush, a short list of all I need to let go:
my perfectionism
my bitterness
my lack of trust in Your perfection and restoration
my delusion of control.
I shook recapping the marker and rereading what I had written, and while everyone else who participated lay their small pieces of cardboard surrender at the foot of the cross, I tacked mine into the cork board cross purposefully and firmly into the square of cork board labeled in bold marker MY PRIDE. Lord, crucify it.
I returned to my seat without hesitating at the cross, closed my eyes when I sat down, and felt myself shake inside, a familiar tremble that I have felt all too often lately-- the tremble of crying, the kind of crying that empties you and gives you hiccups later as a reminder of how wracked your breathing and your heart have been. But this time I wasn't crying quite so hard; there were only a few tears in my eyes. I wasn't crying, but the shaking, the tremor was alive inside.
As the service drew to a close, I thought about my recent bout of emotion and of the many forays into dramatics I have made in the past weeks and of the times in my life I can remember feeling so strongly and so deeply. I am often skeptical of such strong emotional experiences-- what do they really mean if they later fade? what if they are merely a response to the stimulation of a simulated appeal, a carefully crafted combination of lights, music, lyrics, and symbols? what if they're an elaborate creation of my own to trick myself into feeling important, an attempt to convince myself that life is not in vain? what if they're empty? what if they're really blind and conceited and selfish, an obsession with myself? what if they're just feelings? what if they're not really related to God at all?
I can be so skeptical, but why? After all, I love the dramatic, the intense, the passionate, and the symbolic. I'm an English major, after all. I marvel at strength and beauty of a well delivered Shakespearean soliloquy, I sit breathless before the stage of a moving ballet, I wander through art galleries weaving stories in my head to match the paintings, and I weep with Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca. I love the artistic and the dramatic, the sweeping and the moving and the emotional. Why should I admire these things when made by humans and feel skeptical of them when they're in my own heart?
Because I don't want to imagine I know God when I don't, that's why. I am okay overdramatizing almost everything, but I don't want to create a delusion of God inside me. I fear of blaspheming by presuming to know Him or His will, fear of mistaking a hormonal imbalance for an experience with God, fear of daydreaming my own will into handwriting on the wall, fear of creating my own little friendly puppet wishing well God and convincing myself that what is really an elaborate creation of my imagination is really God.
I am scared of surrendering because I don't trust myself to surrender it to a real God. I fear of missing God in a haze, fear of creating a fake spirituality that is not Him.
Why? What have I to gain in that? I'm holding everything back, looking for something I'm not finding, hoping that a new experience, a new book, a new song, a new friend, a new church would make the difference... but nothing ever truly does, not all the way, not to the depth of my need, not to the heart of my sin... not enough to eradicate my perfectionism, my bitterness, my lack of trust in Your perfection and restoration, my delusion of control...
The problem now is not that I don't believe in You. The problem now is not that I don't feel my need of You. The problem now is that I don't trust myself to turn to You and not to an imitation, that I don't trust myself not to succumb to idolatry. But that again is my lack of surrender and my delusion that I am in control. I have to let go of that, let it go to You. Trust in You to restore me... to answer the prayer that was once my weekly petition-- to renew me, guide me, and lead me so that I may delight in Your will and walk in Your ways to the glory of Your holy name.
God, I still don't know that I know who You are. I don't trust myself that much. I don't know how to give up all of my distrust and unbelief and delusion because I don't entirely know how to find You, how to get to You, how truly to trust You to restore. Lord, I'm tired of splitting hairs trying to narrow down exactly what You is the real You, I'm tired of looking at everything under a microscope and still not believing my own eyes. Please take all this that is me, all this brokenness, all this delusion, confusion, bitterness, and sin, and please fill me with what really is You. Take me over. I don't want me because I am wrong. Help me, Lord, let it go... help me know to whom I am relinquishing control, help me know You.
