“Jesus, I surrender myself to you, take care of everything.”
This powerful prayer is taken from the “Surrender Novena.” When I learned there was such a thing called the Surrender Novena, I was delighted. Somehow, living the Christian life (aka our best life), always comes back to resisting the first sin, the temptation to think that God is not really trustworthy. When my adult son shared this novena with me, I hoped it would help me develop greater confidence in God.
On the other hand, as I began to pray the novena, I became conflicted about what it means to leave everything up to God. I mean, God requires us to act, not to sit on the couch of life telling Him to “take care of it.” Love compels us to be deeply invested in God’s plan for salvation, for our own growth in holiness, and in the well-being of our family and of the world. How can we be invested and still “surrender” in the radical way the novena invites us to?
But the Surrender Novena, and especially the short prayer of surrender to Jesus which the suppliant repeats 10 times consecutively, has genuinely helped me, an ardent and awkward disciple of Christ, to find peace, as I try to serve God and do his will.
Jesus, I surrender myself to you, take care of everything.
This prayer has the power to reorient us when we become overwhelmed. It can heighten our awareness to the fact that when something is too much to handle, causing anxiety and a restless spirit, this is the moment we must stop everything—the worry, the scheming, the imagining—and let go. Instead of getting side-tracked or paralyzed by our agitation and fear, surrendering to him allows us to have the serenity and freedom to do whatever the Lord is asking us to do at any given moment.
One of the reflections in the Surrender Novena uses a child’s relationship with his mother as an analogy:
“[To lose confidence in God and become anxious] is like the confusion that children feel when they ask their mother to see their needs, and then try to take care of those needs for themselves so that their childlike efforts get in their mother’s way. Surrender means to placidly close the eyes of the soul, to turn away from thoughts of tribulation and to put yourself in my care, so that only I act, saying, “You take care of it.”
It has helped me to take this analogy further. I picture one of my children doing his spelling homework. All is going well, but eventually, the point to his pencil breaks and he spends 10 unsuccessful minutes trying to sharpen it with a substandard pencil sharpener. At first, he is mildly frustrated, but soon the whole world feels like it is caving in upon him. He realizes that if he doesn’t finish his homework soon, he may not have time to play before bed, since he also needs to complete his chore of unloading the dishwasher. He can imagine getting in trouble if his homework isn’t done the next day and pictures himself failing the spelling test later in the week.
Finally, when he hands the pencil and the sharpener to his mother, asking for help, he is near tears. He stands at her elbow complaining and telling her how to hold the pencil to achieve the proper pointiness, insisting that it has to be “super, duper sharp” for it to be any good at all. Not only does he hinder her efforts, but he gets more and more emotionally worked up while accomplishing nothing. We can see how, if he took a deep breath, handed his mom the pencil, and trusted her to “take care of it,” he would be free to peacefully study his spelling words or even finish unloading the dishwasher while she gets the pencil sharpened.
Jesus, I surrender myself to you, take care of everything.
Surrendering to God is not passive. It is active and it can be much more difficult to “let go” than it is to keep struggling, so we need tools like the Surrender Novena to help us practice and train ourselves to have complete confidence in God. To know how to stop our minds from unproductive fixation, when to take a break from a problem, and how to develop a certain amount of detachment from the projects and complex relationships we know we are called to persevere in.
At a very troubling time, when Jesus was about to be handed over to the Romans, he told his followers to resist the temptation to anxiety as they continued to be his ambassadors to the world, “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. Not as the world gives do I give it to you. Do not let your hearts be troubled or afraid” (Jn 14:27). And again, the first words he said to them after the resurrection were, “Peace be with you” (Jn 20:19).
Jesus clearly had work for his apostles to do, but their trust in his ability to accomplish his work through them would be the key to their otherworldly peace. I can imagine the apostles saying multiple times each day, as they carried on the work that Jesus had entrusted to them, “Jesus, I surrender myself to you, take care of everything.”
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