Hope this Thursday finds everyone well. It has felt like Spring over here in Drayton Valley, and I am definitely getting excited for the snow to melt - and the new baby to arrive.
God bless you all!
Olivia
Week 2: Drops of Blood
This week, I want to focus on surrender.
Surrender is a heavy topic for Catholics because it is an integral aspect of our journey. We are meant to follow the example of Christ in all things, and when it comes to surrender, we have a pretty astonishing example: Christ was so perfectly capable of surrender that He was willing to sacrifice his life to the will of the Father.
Though Christ would have fully understood the purpose of His mission on Earth - as fully God, He knew His life would need to be sacrificed in atonement for our sins, He also knew how much we need example. Just as He gave us the example of Baptism, so He gave us the perfect example of surrender - and the difficulty of it, in the agony of the garden.
In the agony of the garden, chronicled in Mark 14:36, Jesus prays: "Abba, Father. All things are possible for you; take this cup from me. Yet not my will, but yours be done."
A perfect surrender of our lives to God's will includes following His lead without knowing where He is taking us, waiting for God's timing without any expectation of when it will be fulfilled, and trusting in His purpose. As this article states, this type of surrender is hard work: "it requires intense warfare against our self-centered natures."
We tend to think, without really meaning to, that God needs our help. An example of this that revolutionized my idea of surrender came from Father Jim at the last Zeteo event. He described his discernment process, how he began by getting on his knees every night and asking that God would tell him what to do so that he could make it happen. He then challenged us to see what was wrong in that prayer.
God does not need us to know what He is doing, a lot of the time He does not need us to do anything. Anything, that is, but trust. Father Jim explained that his prayer changed to being one of surrender - he asked for the trust required to let God take care of everything, that he may simply walk forward with an open heart. This kind of open-hearted prayer assures that if God wants to tell us or show us something, we will be capable of hearing and seeing this guidance; the rest of the time, we are practicing stillness, trust, and patience.
A really good example of this came from my study of Isaiah last night. The Jewish people were being threatened by the Assyrian army, and even though God was telling them, time and time again through Isaiah, to trust He would not ket them be overtaken, they chose to take matters into their own hands. They formed an alliance with Egypt, which in their human understanding should have saved them, but because they had gone against God's ordinance, they were overtaken by the Assyrians and put into slavery.
In that chapter, Isaiah 30:15, God gives us a beautiful message on surrender. He says: "By waiting and by calm, you shall be saved; in quiet and in trust your strength lies." It was hard for the Jewish people to believe that if they waited on God, if they trusted in His timing without interfering, they would be safe - so they chose to take action that was outside of God's will for them, and they were not blessed in that decision.
Like the Jewish people, how often do we feel God needs our help? How often do we think we are capable of saving ourselves - no matter how many times we have heard that we need to call on God, to trust in Him? How often do we think we can maybe do better than the God who is making us wait, be patient, take the difficult road of stillness?
The truth is, surrender is hard. Jesus gave us the example of how difficult He knew surrender to be in the agony of the garden, when He sweat drops of blood. If you struggle with this as much as I do, let your prayer be like those of Father Jim. A prayer for the trust required to let God take control and for us to simply walk forward with open hearts.
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