To be in control of one’s destiny, job, or finances is nearly an unquestionable moral value in our society. You know the phrase “take control of your life”—it even sounds mature and spiritual to many people. It sounds like the main message of every self-help book. On a practical level, it just may be true. But, not on God’s level. Our bodies, our souls, and especially our failures teach us this as we get older.

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     Yet, learning we are not in control situates us correctly in God’s universe. As Christians, if we are to feel at home in this world [God’s Kingdom], we must believe we are not steering the ship. This teaching is found in all religions. As ministers for the transformation of the world, we must know we are being guided by the Holy Spirit, and our reliance upon this guidance is precisely what allows our journey to happen as beloved children of God. We cannot understand this joy and release unless we have steadfastly and faithfully been there, and experienced the freedom of a life with Christ alongside us and the Holy Spirit’s wisdom guiding our way.

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     Being willing and yielding to allow our ideas, plans, and control to take a back seat to the greater guidance of God’s love, is central to what it means to let go and receive God’s divine surprises in this life—to live “…on earth as it is in heaven.”

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     For some of us, these past few years may be the first time in our lives we have felt so little control over our own destiny, and the destiny of those we love. Does this lack of control feel like a loss? An overwhelming fear? A humiliation? Like falling off   a cliff? An unwanted or under served vulnerability?

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    Recognizing and living into this lack of control is the starting point for a  deeply spiritual and transformational walk towards God’s purposes, wisdom, truth, love and care for us.

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     How can we give up our lives to God’s unexpected plans for us? In the spiritually transformed people I have met, I always sense one common denominator: in some sense they all have died before they died. They have followed in the self-emptying steps of Jesus—a path from death to life that Christians from all over the world celebrate in the season of Eastertide.

 

     They broke through in what felt like a breaking down. How can we give up our lives to God’s unexpected plans for us? In the spiritually

Following Jesus, we must trust the down, and let God take care of the up.

For our prayers, discernment, and meditations during Eastertide, I offer these five consoling and life-giving messages from the New Testament:

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