May 12 - Surrender or else
Scripture focus: By faith, the Israelites marched around the walls of Jericho for seven days, and the walls fell flat. Hebrews 11:30 (The Message)
Everyone who knows me understands that I have a fetish for school supplies. I like to buy them and use them. I love to organize notebooks and cover books with fancy wrappings to protect them. I'd consider going back to school solely for the school supplies. I have found some degree of satisfaction in buying and organizing my children's school supplies too.
Inevitably, a day arrived when each of my children said, "Mom, I can do it myself." This was not a happy day for me, but a necessary one for them. One of the skill sets we all must develop is the ability to take responsibility for our own lives.
However, there is one exception.
There are some things that only God can do. When the Israelites marched around the walls of Jericho for seven days, those walls didn't fall flat because of their excellent walking. Those walls came tumbling down because the tumbling of the walls was within the prevailing purposes of God, and God is in the business of doing things we can't even imagine in our wildest dreams.
Between us and our transformed life are a lot of barriers. Some we erected on our own by living independently of God. Others piled on some bricks to the wall when they did anything that hindered our ability to know God and love his people. Some walls are part of the enemy's desire to kill, steal and destroy us. And according to Randy Pausch (for more on the life and times of Randy Pausch go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randy_Pausch), some walls are there to help us know how much we want to achieve our goals. I guess there are lots of reasons for the barricades that hold us back.
As we grow, we'll learn how to scale many of these walls. Our lessons will come to us in a variety of ways. I suppose that there are even walls that we can learn how to evade without anyone's help. Our gifts and talents, determination and resources will be enough to conquer some challenges without obvious divine intervention (although the argument could readily be made that it is God himself who provides the gifts, talents, determination, resources, etc.). Some walls, however, will only come falling down as we cooperate with God. These are the ones that leave us breathless and powerless and wreak havoc in our lives. They're the ones that create unmanageability, and are stubbornly resistant to our best efforts at renovation. In these instances, the next skill set will be essential.
Skill set #10: We must learn how to let go and let God. Surrendering to God, we choose to cooperate with him rather than demand the right to say, "I can do it myself." One of the things that we are responsible for is learning how to live a life surrendered to our heavenly Father.
Recommended reading: Deuteronomy 14-16
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