Surrender to God When Control Slips Away
Surrender to God comes slowly as Mark A. Taylor reflects on health problems, uncertainty, and the slow realization that control ultimately belongs to God. Through surgery, unanswered questions, and waiting for test results, he considers how trials can teach deeper trust.
- Health struggles can expose how much we rely on the illusion of control.
- Waiting for answers often becomes a spiritual test of trust and patience.
- Surrender to God is learned slowly, often through trials we would not choose.
By Mark A. Taylor
Surrender Comes Slowly
I’m keyboarding this column with an Ace bandage wrapped tightly around my right hand. It covers a small incision in my palm, an area responding to the pressure of my fingers on the keyboard with a small ache to accompany each keystroke.
Tomorrow the bandage and dressing come off, to be replaced by a smaller, store-bought, self-applied variety. It will be the third day since the carpal tunnel surgery that most likely was required because of many earlier computer keyboarding sessions.
This is only the latest in a series of coincidental maladies that convinced me that, even before I reach the golden age of 60, my body is falling apart. I’ll spare you the details—all the symptoms and doctor’s visits and tests. You’ve heard such litanies before from many others, and they all sound the same.
But perhaps you’ve realized, as I have with a couple of months of undiagnosed pains and problems, that health hiccups feel much more serious when they are your own.
Learning the Limits of Control
One thing I’ve learned about myself from several weeks waiting for diagnoses: control is an important issue to me. Having lived a tremendously blessed life, I’ve experienced the illusion of being in control. Kids have done well. Job has been secure. Wife has always been there for me. And nothing’s gone wrong in my body that an aspirin or an antihistamine or an antibiotic wouldn’t take care of. I like it that way.
As it turns out, that pattern is continuing. Tests have revealed nothing more serious than can be cured by some pills (and this inch-long incision in my palm). But this comes after literally weeks of undiagnosed pain and decisions about which doctor to see next and a series of tests and procedures and interminable waits for results. And through it all I realized my body is going to do what it’s going to do with only minimal influence from my will to change it.
Surrender to God
I’m embarrassed it has taken me so many decades of living—and most of those as a Christian, a Christian leader!—to really experience the fact that I’m not in charge. Even as I thank God for a greater measure of equilibrium in my day-to-days, I do so with a greater willingness to submit to God’s control.
I know I’ll still be tempted to believe I can determine what’s next. When that happens, I’m hoping someone close to me will hand me a copy of this column. One blessing of trials is the lessons they can teach us. I’m praying for the grace to remember that surrender to God is the only way to go.
Author: Mark A. Taylor
Mark A. Taylor, who served as Christian Standard editor from 2003 to 2017, retired in June 2017 after almost 41 years with Standard Publishing (Christian Standard Media).
