The Inconvenient Illusion of Control

How surrender is the only path forward

Everything important that has ever happened to me did just that.

It happened to me. I had very little control over the occurrence, whatever it was, good or bad. The best I could do (if it was “good”) was put myself in a postion where the situation was ripe for that good thing to happen. The best I could do (if it was “bad”) was to white knuckle my way through whatever it was, and hope for courage to rise up in me, allowing me to suffer well.

I wrote a few weeks ago about how out of the blue one day I felt God’s presence in a field when I was just a boy. All I did was go out in the field to play. God met me there, as best as I could understand it, without any effort on my part.

There are a dozen other instances of these types of things happening to me. Some felt like wins in the moment. Some felt like losses. There was joy and grief, but rarely was there much agency. The truth is, I was just going about my business. Then, voila!

Something happened that changed the trajectory of my life.

We moved. They left. It ended. She died. A birth. A disappointment. The particular events don’t matter, I need not name them. You have your own list, I’d betcha. My point is simple: We live our lives with impressive amounts of false confidence that we are in control of our own lives.

In reality — or, should I say, Reality — our control is limited almost entirely to how we percieve events. Often, this perception is limited to hindsight. Meanwhile, our life happens and it changes us in deep ways we sometimes do not understand.

Paula D’Arcy says it best: “God comes to you disguised as your life.”

She’s got a point.

This all flies in the face of American Christianity. Our country was founded by people weary of being told what to do, so individual autonomy is baked right into our Christian theology and even our broader cultural sensibility. Choices and their consequences we center in our experience, for many reasons — not the least of which is that they are easier to stomach than powerlessness and surrender.

But how much control do we actually have when it comes to living out our faith? I don’t mean the tired old debate about do we have free will or not. Obviously, the answer to that is yes. And I don’t mean that I don’t believe in God predestining us or choosing us or whatever. I actually believe that, too. What I do mean is that life is complex, deep, mysterious, and unpredictable — and to think we have power over it all is the height of hubris.

We mean well, of course. I did. I heard verses at a young age — starting not long after that day in the field — about what it meant to follow Jesus. This one always got me: