I Do Not Think That Word Means What You Think It Means

Good Friday, And The Meaning Of The Word Surrender

All week long, I’ve had that quote from The Process Bride in my head,

“You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”

For nearly all of my life, save the last ten or so years, I believed that surrender was a word for yellow-bellied quitters, cut from too-soft a cloth to be able to go the hard distance of life. By my estimation, the word surrender was a synonym for cowardice. It was forbidden. To surrender was a treasonous act against the human will to overcome.

My misgivings about surrender have caused myself (and others, who I’d sometimes accused of being obstacles) undo harm, as I have fought tooth-and-nail to live my life, in my own strength.

Likening surrender to failure, makes it near-impossible to release our white-knuckle grip on life, which is of course, exactly what the cross of Christ calls us to do.

Before I could begin to understand what God was asking me to do, I had to come to understand that my life, isn’t really mine.

As created beings we don’t really belong to ourselves—no matter how much society tells us otherwise…We have been bought with a price (1 Corinthians 6:20) (2)

The paradox of this is, that the only way to really learn what it is to surrender is to do it. All of faith is an act of surrender. In faith, we submit our reasonable explanations to a belief that admits and confesses that things may be other than they appear.

Nothing affects our willingness to even be willing to surrender to God, like our belief about what we believe the word actually means.

Of course, other obstacles make the process difficult. Fear, doubt, distrust. We' know there is a cost. We know in our heads what the cross symbolizes. It’s our hearts that can’t fathom it. It’s our hearts that resist.

This is an excerpt from today’s post. Continue reading HERE…