We have tried our best to make plans. We’ve seen plans come to fruition, and in the past 12 months, we’ve seen them completely obliterated. 

We have many options when things don’t go our way. We can mourn it all, or  get angry, or live in denial that things are changing all around us, but in the end, in our own way, we all come to a stage of acceptance. For the Christ follower, that road to acceptance looks different from our fellow brothers and sisters who don’t yet know the Lord. Our road is indeed still filled with sadness, grief, and anger, but our hope in a sovereign Lord wins the day and smooths the road so landing at a place of acceptance means landing in a soft place, with a light burden, near streams of flowing water. To walk this road without Christ is to walk these stages of grief in our own strength and to arrive at acceptance only with the hope that we might yet be okay; that our own strength might be sufficient and maybe that would be enough. 

A year ago this month, we watched the world shut down. We watched disturbing numbers rise, and lost so many of the things that connect us. As students, we lost extra-curricular activities, favorite classes and study groups after school. We lost clubs, youth groups, and opportunities to spend time with friends. High school seniors lost graduation celebrations. Prom was gone. Our plans, as we knew them and continue to wish them to be, are no more. 

So it’s ok to go through the motions. It’s understandable to be sad about this past year. It’s understandable to get angry, to deny reality, and to even try to negotiate something that will make you feel better. But what’s not okay is to shoulder these burdens ourselves. We have a Savior whose Word is filled with verses that encourage us to cast our cares on Him and trust Him during hard times. To surrender.

Surrender is, by definition, humbling, because it means acknowledging defeat and giving in to the demands of the victor. The good news for Christ-followers is that we are surrendering something bad in exchange for something good. We are surrendering burdens of this world - discouragement, injustice, frustration, unfairness - to a Sovereign God who can take these burdens and use them in His plan for our good and his glory. But in the world, when surrender happens, one side is now dependent upon the other to fill the voids of what they lost. As an example, business owners surrendered their businesses in the early stages of the pandemic for the sake of public safety, and in return, depended upon the government to provide the income lost. When we first come to Christ, we surrender our sin, and depend on Him to fill the voids that we were previously using our sin to fill in our lives. We depend on Him for security, for hope, for pleasure and enjoyment, for meaning and purpose. Once we follow Christ, we continually seek Him, and surrender the burdens the world tries to hand us: busyness, anger, frustration, greed, the inevitable desire to place ourselves and our comforts above the Lord’s calling on our lives. We surrender these things, and in return, depend on Him to be enough: to be enough rest in the midst of our busyness; to provide resources when we’re not working at the break-neck speed of our peers. To provide peace in the middle of frustration. To provide for us - not for the lifestyle we want, but for the life He’s called us to live for His glory. 

This is all worship to Him. It is worshipful to lay down our worries and tell Him that our trust is in Him alone, not in what we can control. It is worshipful to lay down our lifestyle and examine whether or not we’re pursuing what’s pleasant to us or what’s pleasing to Him in the way we spend our time, our money, or treat other people. It is worshipful to depend on Him like we have nothing else, because it puts our hearts in a position to obey. 

So this month, we examine our hearts, and look at what it means to worship God through surrender and dependence.