I wear a necklace called “Surrender,” a person on their knees with their arms lifted and hands open together, a person ready to release all that they are, to give it all heavenward, to give whatever He needs to take, and to take whatever He needs to give.
“Renew” and “surrender” were God’s focus words for me in 2021; “surrender” is still His word for me in 2022. He speaks to me every day about letting Him have a different piece of me, a piece that I try to hold back, or take back, or wrench back completely. He has something different in mind for that piece.
Today He spoke to my heart, saying that surrender is my key to a life of freedom, a knowing of peace in stormy days, a sighing sense of self-forgetfulness and security on a path that is pleasing to Him and to my own soul. It is a place where His power pervades.
In my devotional today, He said:
I will bring my will to pass, as you yield your all to me. As you live a life of surrender, sacrificing your will for mine, my ways become your joy. Leave behind what hinders your soul in order to embrace the higher way of life. Cling to me and I will renew you and lead you along the journey.
Simmons, Brian and Gretchen Rodriguez. I Hear His Whisper: Encounter God’s Heart For You. Broadstreet Publishing Group, 2019.
Yield. To give way. To His higher ways of Life. Don’t power struggle, just release the waste-of-time tension, turn towards the singularity of un-taught knots. Take Joy in this noncompeting. Yield to the “yes” in His eyes and the smile on His face. Then yield, produce, that which is His desire for you.
That is what the greatest love says: ‘I have my will, and God has His will, and when those two don’t meet, I let go of mine to take up God’s.’ This is a movement of the divine exchange: He takes my brokenness and gives me His wholeness—and I give up my way and take up His.
Voskamp, Ann. Waymaker. Nashville: W Publishing Group, 2022, p. 137.
The pieces I like to take back, those are the broken ones, unfixable in my hands but still shiny as if I could. He cannot make whole what He does not have in His hands. He’s got to have all the pieces. Each plan that didn’t pan out, each disappointment, each discouragement, each downtrodden betrayal—all the pieces. To give freely what He needs to take. To take what He deeply wants to give. This is the sweetest surrender, no longer refusing the good, the best, the most that He tries to give.
There is rest and quieted voices. There is stillness with one hopeful eye on the Light and the other hopeful eye on the Love. There is a laughing, genuine, and relaxed shoulders. There is a transcending that is pleasing to your soul.
The Art of Choosing True Life 