One of the great paradoxes of the spiritual life is that surrendering to God doesn’t make us less free—it makes us truly free.
I first discovered that when I was eleven years old. At Shakey’s Pizza Parlor, of all places.
My late father, Ralph, was an accountant who played banjo at Shakey’s on weekends for extra cash. Sometimes our family went to watch Dad perform. He and the piano player dressed in Gay ’90s garb, complete with boater hats. Dad’s signature song was Bye, Bye Blues, which ended with increasingly wild banjo strumming before the final note. It always brought down the house and made us proud.
It was in the middle of one of these lively evenings that I turned to my mother, Sylvia, with a question that apparently couldn’t wait until we got home. “I don’t get why I would believe or trust God more than anyone else.”
Mom somehow managed to take my question seriously despite the banjo music and pizza. She looked me in the eye and said, “We never know what the other side of the chasm really looks like until we jump over. It’s called a leap of faith. Try it—you’ll see for yourself.”
Making the leap
As it happened, God gave me an opportunity to test Mom’s theory the very next day.
My sister and I shared a bedroom, although at eleven I considered my half of it a sovereign nation with strictly enforced borders. That day, she had left part of her homework a few inches inside my territory. Naturally, this was intolerable.
I wanted to be mean to her. But I remembered what Mom had said and decided to try the leap. Instead of giving my sister what I thought she richly deserved, I asked God to make me not feel mean. And then something happened that astonished me.
The anger disappeared. I wasn’t merely gritting my teeth and managing not to yell. I actually felt different. I could be nice to my sister. In the space of a few moments, I had been freed from anger into peace.
And even at eleven years old, I knew I hadn’t done it myself. I had trusted God to give me the grace to act more like him—and he had.
A bigger kingdom
Since then, I’ve learned that freedom in God rarely feels like getting my own way. It feels more like being freed from needing to have my own way.
These days, the battle isn’t over a few inches of bedroom carpet. It’s over wanting people to think like I do. Work as fast as I do. Do things the way I would do them. Appreciate me as much as I think they should.
In other words, I’m still defending my little kingdom.
But I’ve also learned what my eleven-year-old self discovered that day: every time I surrender a little piece of that kingdom to God, he gives me something better in return.
I become freer to forgive. Freer to be patient. I can let somebody else be wrong without appointing myself head of the Bureau of Standards.
Work in progress
I still fail at this regularly. Some days I hand God my will with open palms. Other days He practically has to pry my plans loose, one finger at a time. But I have never regretted trusting God more than myself.
Mom was right. You don’t really know what’s on the other side of the chasm until you jump.
Your leap probably won’t involve a little sister and a disputed patch of bedroom carpet. Maybe it means forgiving someone who hasn’t apologized. Letting go of an outcome you desperately want to control. Trusting God with a diagnosis, a child, your finances, or a future you can’t see clearly.
The leap can feel like giving something up. But that’s the paradox.
What I discovered at eleven, and keep rediscovering all these years later, is that surrendering to God doesn’t shrink our freedom—it expands it.
We jump thinking we are giving up our little kingdom—and discover that God was waiting to give us his.
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This post was first published on Sacred Pause with Rose Folsom and is republished here with permission.
Image: Unsplash+
