October 29, 2009
Letting Go
We tell ourselves and each other to, ‘just turn it over to the Lord’, but that’s easier said than done. Right after my sister passed away, some of the family sat with her for a couple hours in the nursing home just reminiscing before we called for the mortuary. When the funeral home did come, it was with abandon and great relief that I emotionally turned Shelly’s body over to the Funeral Director. My job was done and there was no more that I could do for her. Now if I could just learn to give my problems over to the Lord as easily. Rarely do I feel that same relief when I turn a problem over to the Lord…obviously I’m neither letting go of them quickly, nor permanently.
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2 comments:
Gail;
-----Clichés have bothered me all my Christian life. When I was attending a Pentecostal church I continually heard “pray it through.” I was too embarrassed to ever ask what was meant by that. Same with “letting go” and “turn it over to the Lord”. In my early adult life I was notorious for sitting on a problem and waiting for some kind of resolution to just happen. A good way to passively ruin your life! I needed the clichés to be filled with some sort of meaning..
-----I have come to realize that there is meaning in this cliché. To let go and turn a problem over to the Lord is not to passively sit on it and wait for the Lord to resolve it. I assure you from my experience, He does not usually do that. He leaves us to live in this fractured and twisted world, therefore we must be functional and effective in it.
-----Turning something over to the Lord is not a magical cure invoked by expressing the incantation. Knowledge of the Word and the problem, wisdom and emotional states built by obedience, and faith in the reality of God and His personal involvement in the affairs of your life are all elements of turning something over to the Lord. Your own responsibilities and efforts in the situation are augmented with these, not replaced by magic. The Word may not instruct you on how to set a processor into a motherboard, but it speaks to the patience, willingness to follow detailed instruction, and need for personal initiative that will gain you the skills to do it. The ways of doing right are its instructions, and those ways apply to everything that happens in life. So knowing as much about the problem as possible provides its interconnection with the ways of doing right. Moreover, life in the Lord is like a glass of water poured onto a table - it spreads over the whole surface. So obedience to the Word in one situation effects the nature of all other situations by the simple penchant for obedience that it reinforces in you. General insights form from it which have general applicability to all situations, and the persuasiveness of the past success of those insights becomes almost compelling to their further use: the two fibers of wisdom. So, when you experience continually a relatively successful application of the Word to your situations, emotions spread the tendency to almost reflexively respond even more with its principles.
-----All of this is your part in “turning it over to the Lord”. One must not simply step back from his problems and see what comes. By functioning in your life to the best of your ability according to the instructions of the Lord, you are turning all of your situations over to those instructions, and therefore to Him. But “the best of our ability” leaves much to be desired. Read Job 38. We are in fact more incapable than we are capable and more unknowledgeable than we are knowledgeable. Fortunately we are wiser than we are foolish. When our abilities and efforts reach the end of a rope, when all that we can do in a situation has been done, a spell of waiting is necessary. It isn’t a waiting for the Lord to do the rest. It is a waiting for Him to lengthen the rope, to provide more information and opportunity so you can take further initiative.
-----Faith in Him produces waiting at the end of the rope as much as it does application of His principles all along the rope. It understands He is more real than are we, more caring than we, and more engaged. Yet sometimes, there at the end of our rope, He surprises us by lengthening the rope with a solution rather than with more information and opportunities.
Love you all,
Steve Corey
I have been intending to write you about your 10/29/09 blog. I didn't read all of the comment( & probably should have), but my experience has not been similar to Steve's. I can recall a few times when I had a BIG problem. I don't remember if I caused them or they were caused by someone else, but they were serious & I had done everything humanly possible to take care of whatever the wrong was with no results or solution. Finally, I prayed to God & told him the situation & I am sure prayed as humbly as I knew how & acknowledged that I could not fix the problem & asked for His help. If I remember correctly, I prayed something like, "Father, You know the problem now & I give it to You". I haven't had that many problems that were so bad I couldn't fix or get human help to fix & I never turned the problem over to God often enough to abuse asking for His help like this.
I don't remember any of the problems, but I distinctly remember the few times, I did ask for help like that, the problem was fixed & final.
Ken
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