Not-So-Sweet Surrender

The music of John Denver has served as part of the background of my family’s car rides since I was little. My favorite Denver song remains “Sweet Surrender,” in part because of the sheer glory of the music and in part because I’m just not very good at it. Surrendering, that is. In fact, I’m pretty lousy at it.

In the song, Denver sings, “Live, live without care, like a fish in the water, like a bird in the air.” Having spent a fair amount of my life in nature, I do admit I look to birds and fish as models of surrender. Sometimes I catch an eagle perched high atop a dead tree leaning out over a lake or a hawk hanging on a lazy updraft or a fish darting surface-side just long enough to leave an O-shaped ripple behind, and I think, Ah to live like that. I get it.

Throughout the song, Denver tries to disengage himself from both the pull of the past and the push toward the future, ever trying to appreciate the singular, sacred power of the present moment. In my own life that appreciation has come to me by looking at water lapping on a rock, in a cleanly cut pile of wood, in the carefree laughter of my children, in the curve of an open tree-shaded country road, in the arch of my wife’s knowing eyebrow. At those times, I think, Sweet surrender. I reach, Denver. I reach.

So yes, in my best moments, I have the ability to surrender. I can exist in the here and now and appreciate what’s been given to me. I can’t say if Denver was writing with the Christian idea of surrender in mind when he wrote this masterpiece, but at the very least he absorbed the idea of accepting what is, neither lamenting what was or is nor longing for what is to be. He sings, “My life is worth the livin’, I don’t need to see the end.” That’s a lyric that is true for all of us, secular and faithful alike.

But I, like many people, maybe most, do not surrender well or easily. I don’t do surrendering. I resist, I fight, I grieve, I gripe. Over the years I’ve gotten maybe a bit better at doing all of these things less. The hard emotions do not consume me as they once did. But I don’t believe, to quote the Borg on Star Trek, that “resistance is futile.” I’m not very willing to surrender to “what is” if “what is” is not great. Frankly, I get up in God’s grill about things. He and I have heated conversations. He still gets His way of course, no matter how much I bark. But I still bark and pull at my leash and resist my master’s guidance. I wish I could say otherwise.

But sometimes, honestly, I don’t wish it.

Like Jacob, I wrestle with God. I’ve done so all my life. Even in the long years when I didn’t believe in God, we struggled together. And we do so now and probably always will. And like Jacob, I crave God’s blessing, even when I see it, even when I do wrong, even when I feel like He’s ignoring the needs of me and mine. I want to think I can be molded into what God wants me to be. A chunk of me really does want to surrender. But I also believe that I’ve been made this way for a reason. So I won’t go gently, to paraphrase Dylan Thomas. Sometimes I have to rage at what I believe is wrong with the world. I’ll likely do so until my own light goes out.

I think many people are like me. We push and pull in our own wrestling matches with divine will. We want to surrender, but something innately human in us resists that surrender. We think we know better. We get up. We fight back. We don’t quit.

Now there are times that I’ve surrendered. I’ve begged for God’s help in the most desperate of ways in the bleakest of times. And like every being wrapped in a finite lifespan, I got good and annoyed when things unfold in God’s own time. Believing my attempt at surrender a failure, I get up off my knees to fight back. To resist. To struggle against whatever unholy mess I’m in.

But the question has to be asked. Does God want me to do that? Does He want me to get so mad in my moments of surrender that I find the courage to fight on once more? I like to think so. But I wonder if I just prolong my agony by my hardheaded resistance to surrender. I’ll never know.

In “Sweet Surrender,” John Denver sounds like he would be pals with Job. Now that’s a pair. The two of them could live without care as every sort of misery is laid down upon them, as everyone they love is taken from them, as everything they work for is destroyed. In Job’s case, his faith in God’s protection and providence is far stronger than mine. While I admire the power of Job’s story and his ability to surrender, I can’t emulate it. At least, not yet.

Not yet.

Most of my life I’ve believed that the idea of this type of surrender comes in a single, lost moment, in which a desperate person gives all over to the will of God and accepts whatever comes. Maybe that works for some people. But for thick-skulled characters like me, what if surrender is a process? What if all I can and should do is give up a little more of my desire for control each time I need to surrender? What if every time I need to surrender it helps me to better understand that humans have no control apart from our own free will to accept or not accept?

I can tell you one thing that has changed in me over the years. When the storms come, I do still get mad at God, but I no longer try to walk away from Him. To be honest, one of my most fervent prayers is, “Please, please don’t let this make me turn against You.”

Nevertheless, I keep my grip on God’s shoulders as He pushes against me, trying to wrestle me into the direction He wants me to go. But in my stubbornness, I never let go no matter how I might get injured. Now that I have Him and know He has always had me, I can’t set Him free. Not now. Not ever. Not until I get that undeserved blessing upon me and mine and all those He puts in my path to help.