Surrender

Surrender is not giving up. Rather it is allowing yourself to be led by God so that you can be called up on to fulfill your role in this lifetime. We think we know what we should do; this life teaches us to strive, aspire, plan, achieve and accomplish, but what if, instead of always pushing, we created space to allow our aspirations to be either blown up 10-fold or completely challenged because God has other plans for us?

Surrender is recognizing that the lower mind or ego tries to merge your body and soul as one and the same. The ego likes to make everything about ‘I’ – about ‘it’ and believes that when things happen, they are happening TO you. But the soul knows that things happen FOR you.

Surrender is trusting the Divine Plan and Divine Time. Surrender is not passive. But it is all trusting. It is not complacent or submissive, it is active, dynamic and takes a heightened level of awareness to be in the place of complete trust.

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When most people say they trust God, they express this trust only to the extent that things are going their way. It is a way to feel like they are accepting God’s Will. But really, if things don’t go their way, can they accept it as God’s Will and trust that it was for the best? When we lose a job, a promotion, a partner to divorce or death or when they are exposed to illness or disease or are even terminally ill, it is at this point that we must learn to accept God’s Will. To realize that this is a part of God’s greater plan for our life.

I often find that Surrender comes on the heels of trauma or great stress or distress; when we find ourselves at the end of our rope, that is when we are likely to say we quit.

That is when we are vulnerable enough, defeated enough and exhausted enough to say I surrender.

Which says that until that point, even though we think we are accepting of God’s Will we usually aren’t.

We are still exerting our strong will because as humans we are programmed to never back down, to never quit. We are told that quitting is worse than failing. Quitting isn’t an option. All this flamboyant talk, but what does that do? It makes people think that we can force our way, power our way, work our way to anything and we can take all the glory at the end. We like to say its our blood, sweat and tears that earned us such and such – but what about God’s hand in it? What if we didn’t have to work so hard? What if it could just flow?

For 10 years I pushed and pushed toward the wrong relationship, fighting an uphill battle of wanting love and acceptance. It was never easy, it never was light or fun. It was intense from start to finish. I felt like I could fix it, I felt like I could change him.

Two weeks after he released me from his life, I met my now husband. I wasn’t looking. I was devastated, broken, vulnerable. God sent me love in the form of a man who was the polar opposite of the man I had spent the past decade with.

In the past two decades of my life, I spent another 10 years chasing what I thought was my dream job, dream life, dream ideas. Only for it to never quite work. I put in a lot of hard work and consistent effort for 10 years. But it didn’t pay dividends.

Then as I started to come to terms with this, and started to release the attachment I had to making that dream work, the dream jo that I didn’t even realize I wanted fell into my lap and I can’t be happier professionally than I am right now. There are no ‘buts’ in this job – you know…”I would love this job, but the commute sucks,” or “I would love everything about this job, but this one person makes my life miserable, or I hate having to do such and such aspect of the job.” This job has none of those buts. Everything falls into place with ease.

Even while married to my beloved and having two amazing kids, at one point I went through a phase of complete devastation and felt utterly incapable of doing this life. As a result of the acute stress, I manifest ill health. It was here that I completely surrendered finally. I stopped pushing, stopped aspiring and stopped trying to do this life which I felt I was failing to do well.

And this is when God took this as an invitation to come in and take over when I said “I can’t do this life.” It is from there that I rebuilt or rather He built my life to be this wondrous, joy-filled existence that it is and the best part of this is that I don’t strive, aspire, push, persevere anymore.

I work from a place of inspiration.

I have complete trust in the goals that I set and have absolutely knowledge that as long as I continue to keep space and priority for God, these human goals will be nothing for God to help me achieve.

He showed me a life that I didn’t dream of for myself, he is continuing to show me how little my goals were, and how much more I can be, do and have.

Now I can be Present in the here and now. I don’t wonder how life will turn out. I love every present moment.

Every time I find myself with time, I am struck by wonder. For someone who could never find a moment’s rest, I find myself with time and for me this is an even greater luxury than money. Because in this time, I have a space to love God, to speak to Him and to hear from Him and to fulfill His plans for my life.

Which are way more fun and joy-filled than mine ever were.