Surrender

“Our natural tendency is to hold on tightly, to try to protect and preserve whatever we think we can’t live without.  We are afraid that if we surrender everything to God – our health, our material possessions, our family, our reputation, our career plans, all our rights, our future – He might take us up on it!”  (Nancy Leigh Demoss –Surrender)

 

When my youngest son was three weeks old he became very ill.  He was hospitalized and not expected to live.  I remember sitting in the PICU staring down at my little baby with a ton of wires coming out of him.  He was perfectly still and sleeping, they had given him medication to paralyze and keep him sleeping.  His little body was vibrating forcefully from the breathing machine circulating air in his lungs.  His eyes and lips were swollen and we weren’t allowed to touch him for days.  It was awful.

I sat there praying.  I didn’t want to leave his side.  I didn’t care if I ate or slept.  I just wanted to sit with him and pray.  It was all I had to offer this beautiful boy whose life had blessed me so much in our short time together.  I couldn’t make him better, I couldn’t comfort him, hold him, kiss him or feed him, but I could pray. 

It had been an extremely rough year for my family.  I had lost an Aunt I was very close to and a grandpa who was more like my dad.  My heart was being put to the test with how much pain it could take.  With those two deaths God was teaching me to surrender and I believe preparing my heart so that I could surrender into His hands the life of my son. 

I thanked God over and over for the 9 months that I got to carry this little life in my body, to feel him grow and move.  I thanked Him for the time I was blessed with being able to love him, take caring of him, and see him.  I was scared to let go but I gave God back the gift that He had given to me.  I surrendered my control and trusted in my God.  I prayed for his healing and I prayed for God’s will.  I prayed for the strength and peace that can only come from God.  God gave me that strength and peace. 

“I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.”  Ephesians 3:16-19

 

God has given us such a gift in our children and it is scary when God asks us to surrender them.  Ask for money, jobs, homes, but please don’t ask for my children!  But He does.  And just like Nancy Leigh Demoss said in her quote, we don’t surrender them because we are afraid God will take us up on it.  And we don’t know what that looks like if God takes us up on it. 

 

Details of that surrender I can’t give.  But I can tell you that surrendering your child to God is the safest and most loved place your child will ever rest, even more safe than momma’s arms.  And I believe that I could surrender my own child only because I knew the safety and love of those arms.  They had comforted and loved me in a way that no one else could.  They have never left me or forsaken me.  They have been my shelter in the storm, my place of refuge and strength.

 
God did heal my son.  My family and a whole lot of other people were touched by God’s hand through my son’s healing.  The doctors said it was a miracle that he was healed.  They never did find out the cause for him being so sick.  He even had 6 months of follow up care to continue to search for the cause and they could never explain why he was so healthy when every test said he shouldn’t be.

What in your life is God telling you to surrender so He can give you that peace, strength, and comfort that lies only in His arms?  Have you tasted and seen that the Lord is good?  Do you know that your children are never safer than when you place them back in the arms of the Father who gave them to you?  What strength and peace is God waiting to give you on the other side of that surrender?