Put it back.

Have you ever been in one of those conversations where all is going just peachy and suddenly the subject changes to one that has you frantically looking around for an escape? That was me this past week. I was relaxing, having a casual and comfortable conversation with a friend when out of nowhere the subject changed. Unbeknownst to them, these new topic words landed in my ears like clumsy dancers, flouncing around the big red button in my brain that if pushed, ensues chaos and panic.

On any normal day I would have fully let the chaos take over. Everything in me wanted to sit there feuding in pity and frustration, but this day was different. For the past few weeks God has posed one continuous reminder to me: Put it in my hands.

I sat squirming in my seat, craving control and answers but in the second when my emotions could have gone to either extreme, I breathed and silently presented God with the issue and asked him to take it from my fumbling fists. The very next second, I felt unexplainable peace and I continued in the conversation with a weight lifted from my heart. It was such a strong feeling that I almost didn’t know how to believe it and I dared to try and bring back the frustration but I couldn’t. My problem was out of my hands.

I can’t seem to escape this concept of peace. This entire year, starting at the turn of 2018, God has purposed to teach me about His peace. How to hold to it, know it and feel it. Lately I’ve been sitting in a season of constant learning and most days that looks like re-discovering things that are common head knowledge but not quite yet heart knowledge. If you haven’t gathered by now, I am a professional stressor and worrier, and I crave organization and control, so peace is highly necessary for me, which I know all too well but it’s a whole new thing when it comes to living it out.

So this new experience of feeling and living this surpassing-understanding-peace in the face of stress looked fantastic to me and I celebrated my little victory the whole rest of the evening. That is until that same concern came up later but this time I chose the habitual alternative reaction.

Fast forward to three days after the above mentioned conversation. It was a great day; I was doing my own little thing and not necessarily feeling the need for any extra peace so I carelessly saw no reason to guard my brain’s big red button. One minute I was putting laundry away, the next minute I was silently scrunched up on the bed being beaten by worry.  I had the option to hand it over to God right away but my blistered fingers were clinging to it in hopes to control and fix. I sat there for a long time refusing comfort but when I started riding into the ‘point of no return zone’, my husband came in and voice firm but full of love, told me to “Put it back. Put it back in God’s hands.”

Right then there were only two options in my mind: hand the problem to God before the emotions get too involved or let the emotions run their course and then try again. The suggestion of putting it back right in the middle was new. And needed. It was hard and inelegant but do-able. It took prayer, decisiveness and some sleep but I got there.

Whenever I get on the other side of my frantic emotions I can laugh at how naturally I believe that I know best, thinking I can handle it all, but it is a belief so misguided.  

This clawing at control reaction gives me a mental picture of how ridiculous this belief truly is: Imagine working with a world renowned surgeon; you’ve been invited to observe an intense, life or death, unending hours long surgery but every couple minutes, you keep speaking up with suggestions or even going to the extreme of taking the tools right from the surgeon’s hands to try it for yourself. This far out example is so unreasonable and something that one would never even dream of doing but as outlandish as it is, we do it every day just under different circumstances.

The all-knowing, all-powerful, Creator of Life knows how to perfectly handle our overwhelming-to-us dilemmas. Who are we to try and take control from His more than able hands? Something that I constantly forget is that as part of the deal as humans, we aren’t given the convenience of control; it’s not ours to strive for. However, we are given the convenience of peace and grace. We shouldn’t even have them as an option but through the cross, we do. I don’t know about you but I’m not willing to lose this free gift of peace over the trivial need to manage and fix.

Slowly but surely, I’m understanding that I need to put EVERYTHING in God’s capable hands. When stress comes up, I have to let go and find all the thankful points. When jealousy arises, I have to refuse to fall into its trap and turn my face toward God. When my dreams seem unreachable, I have to choose to remember that God writes infinitely better stories than I do. When I’m overwhelmed by the waves of life, I have to remember that my God is big and I am small.  

This isn’t just a goal that I’m hoping to get to, I’m getting reminded to every day, and I’ve already experienced the reward that comes with leaving it all and resting in the calm that God replaces the disorder with.  Worry fails to help with anything and can even disguise itself as practical but reality shows it only works against you. Years trained me to anticipate stress in given situations but I’m learning to shift my mentality from expecting stress to expecting God’s goodness and through that mindset I can start seeing it in everything.

It takes the discipline (with lots of prayer) of awareness to recognize when we need to make the choice to immediately hand everything up. The practical steps are to know your triggers and be proactive in covering them in prayer before the problem gets too big and too close. It’s a habit to be formed and thankfully it’s not impossible. Even on the bad days when we start slipping our fingers back into the mix, it’s never too late to step away and let loose our grip.

If there is a recurring matter that won’t stop nagging at you or if you suffer from endless stress from lack of control, I’m here to softly share the reminder that I also desperately need; your hands are weak and stained with failings but God’s scarred hands hold the expansion of the universe.

In these recent weeks, I’ve been hanging on to a verse found in Romans 8:6,

“For to set your mind on things of the flesh is death but to set your mind on things of the Spirit is life and peace.”

That sounds like a pretty decent trade off to me.

Let’s stop grasping for immediate answers and power over problems because that will only lead to death; rather let’s choose to bask in covering peace. 

Put it back in God’s hands, whatever your “it” is. Fix your mind on Him, and there you will find unending life and peace.