My friend Corrie shared this post recently (follow her weird and wonderful writing her https://www.facebook.com/PigInTheRiver/). I’ll be honest–I never planned on being an expert on living life with unfulfilled desires. But we teach each other from our lives, right? Perspective is what we’re here for. So here is Corrie’s story about surrender as a practice.
[originally shared on Facebook, May 3, 2019]
surrender happens every day and in different ways.
this surprised me.
and it took a single friend to show me how some things never go away: her singleness, her desire for marriage and seeing that it’s probably not in the cards, maybe not ever in the cards, those longings she’ll never not feel – aware of them every day, surrendering them every day, honoring this place of without — every. day. surrender for her looks like saying: this is not what I hoped or planned or intended but I accept what is not as well as what is. it doesn’t mean glossing over what she wasn’t given with some trite getrichquick scheme of counting the blessings in the hand she was dealt. does she see and receive her gifts? yes. *and* she sees what is not. it is not either/or. it never has been. it has always been both/and.
I thought that surrender, for me, meant I could finally lay it down once and for all. I have scorned how frequently I pick it all back up: daily, sometimes hourly, sometimes still holding it every minute.
I didn’t know that sometimes we live with things forever, maybe our whole lives, and that pain, that sadness and ache and frustration is maybe always there within our hands not because we’ve remained unyielding but because we’ve remained yielding: yielding is something that doesn’t end and there is always something -sometimes the same things- broken to give and acknowledge and honor. the yielding is in loosening my grasp even if it is still in my hands. this is where Grace comes, trickles, and seeps in.
that’s the surrender, the ongoing nature of it: the sacrifice – and it always costs. and it’s accepting what he gives in return, and sometimes? I don’t care for what the giving hand holds.
I used to think surrender meant giving something up forever, like I threw it off fully and healed without a scar to remind me and it’s not a burden and it’s not something I think about or something I no longer grieve or wish were different.
but if this were true in any respect: would I still even need a Savior?
Grace comes in, it trickles and seeps, and it fills the hollows, but it doesn’t erase them. Bidden or unbidden, God is present.
Notes from the Sea 