Surrendering and letting go are about willingness and trust. They’re about having enough faith to want something so much that we can taste it; then deliberately letting go of our desires and trusting our Higher Power to do for us what He wants, when He wants. They’re about believing in God and His love for us even when it hurts….
We don’t have to surrender or let go perfectly. We only need do it as well as we can, today.
— Melody Beattie, Beyond Codependency, p. 241
“But of course!” said the Spirit, shining with love and mirth so that my eyes were dazzled. “That’s what we all find when we reach this country. We’ve all been wrong! That’s the great joke. There’s no need to go on pretending one was right! After that we begin living.”
— from The Great Divorce, by C. S. Lewis
What is surrendering? What does it mean to “let go”? Surrendering is accepting; letting go is releasing. Surrendering is acknowledging the authority of a Higher Power; letting go is trusting His authority.
What do we need to surrender to and let go of? Our past, present, and future. Our anger, resentments, fears, hopes, and dreams. Our failures, successes, hate, love, and desires. We let go of our time frame, our wants, sorrows, and joys. We release our old messages, our new ones, our defects of character, and attributes. We let go of people, things, and sometimes ourselves. We need to let go of changes, changing, and the cyclical nature of love, recovery, and life itself.
We release our guilt and shame over being not good enough, and our desire to be better and healthier. We let go of things that work out and things that don’t, things we’ve done, and things we haven’t done. We let go of our unsuccessful relationships and our healthy relationships. We let go of the good, the bad, the painful, the fun, and the exciting. We surrender to and let go of our needs. Often, a hidden need to be in pain and suffering is underneath our failed relationships, pain, and suffering. We can let go of that too. All of it must go.
Surrendering doesn’t mean we stop desiring the good. It means that after acknowledging our desires, we relinquish them and get peaceful and grateful about circumstances, people, and our lives exactly as they are today.
— Melody Beattie, Beyond Codependency, p. 240
What is more (and I can hardly find words to tell you how important I think this), it is just the people who are ready to submit to the loss of the thrill and settle down to sober interest, who are then most likely to meet new thrills in some quite different direction. The man who has learned to fly and become a good pilot will suddenly discover music; the man who has settled down to live in the beauty spot will discover gardening.
This is, I think, one little part of what Christ meant by saying that a thing will not really live unless it first dies. It is simply no good trying to keep any thrill: that is the very worst thing you can do. Let the thrill go — let it die away — go on through that period of death into the quieter interest and happiness that follow — and you will find you are living in a world of new thrills all the time. But if you decide to make thrills your regular diet and try to prolong them artificially, they will all get weaker and weaker, and fewer and fewer, and you will be a bored, disillusioned old man for the rest of your life. It is because so few people understand this that you find many middle-aged men and women maundering about their lost youth, at the very age when new horizons ought to be appearing and new doors opening all round them. It is much better fun to learn to swim than to go on endlessly (and hopelessly) trying to get back the feeling you had when you first went paddling as a small boy.
— C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity
Living in eternity is, in fact, the way we are supposed to live all the time, right now, in the immediate moment, not hanging onto the past, not projecting into the future. The past is the rock that is under our feet, that enables us to push off from it and move into the future.
— Madeleine L’Engle, Sold Into Egypt, quoted in Glimpses of Grace, compiled by Carole F. Chase
Forgiveness involves handing over to God the responsibility for justice. The longer we hold onto it, the more it strangles us.
— Beth Moore, Praying God’s Word Day by Day, p. 73
Once you’ve identified your unenforceable rule, you need to figure out how to hold on to the enforceable desire and get rid of the unenforceable demand. Hoping that things will go the way you want and working hard to get your wishes gratified is a good approach to your relationship. At the same time, remind yourself that you cannot control your lover’s behavior, and it is foolish to demand things that your lover isn’t willing to give. Try substituting the words “hope” or “wish” for “must” or “have to” in your unenforceable expectation or demand. This will help you to avoid driving yourself crazy and retain the energy to maximize the relationship you have….
Challenging your unenforceable rules lets you take responsibility for your feelings and helps you take your partner’s quirks less personally. You become aware that much of what you took personally about your partner’s behavior was only rules you could not enforce. You remember that you love your partner, not the things you are demanding from him or her. Once you do this, you can see that your thinking played a significant role in the anger and hurt that you felt. As you challenge your rules, you will see that clearer thinking leads to more peaceful coexistence in your marriage and day-to-day life….
Notice that when you wish or hope that things will be a certain way, you think more clearly and are more peaceful than when you demand that they be a certain way.
— Dr. Fred Luskin, Forgive for Love, p. 121-123
Another important part of the miracle is Jesus’ concern for the fragments, because he is always concerned about the broken things, the broken people. Only when we realize that we are indeed broken, that we are not independent, that we cannot do it ourselves, can we turn to God and take that which he has given to us, no matter what it is, and create with it.
— Madeleine L’Engle, The Rock That Is Higher, quoted in Glimpses of Grace, compiled by Carole F. Chase, p. 63
Cursing is a boomerang. If I will evil towards someone else, that evil becomes visible in me. It is an extreme way of being forensic, toward myself, as well as toward whoever outrages me. To avoid contaminating myself and everybody around me, I must work through the anger and the hurt feelings and the demands for absolute justice to a desire for healing. Healing for myself, and my anger, first, because until I am at least in the process of healing, I cannot heal; and then healing for those who have hurt or betrayed me, and those I have hurt and betrayed.
— Madeleine L’Engle, A Stone for a Pillow, quoted in Glimpses of Grace, compiled by Carole F. Chase
Psychologists and various social scientists often talk about the theoretical concept of separation, and the need for adolescents to separate from their parents and families and establish their independence. Adolescence is thought of as a time when teenagers venture out on their own to discover themselves, so that they can come back to their families as fully individuated adults. Fat chance. The simplistic notion of independence versus dependence in the context of separation is outdated and inaccurate — if indeed it ever was a reflection of reality — and it needlessly pits parents and teenagers against one another. Connection is the foundation of a healthy parent-teenager relationship — a connection that is based on interdependence.
Therefore, you need to erase the idea of separation from your mind and replace it with the concept of extension. That is, during adolescence teenagers need to extend away from their parents, all the while staying connected to their parents. Their job is to extend; your job is to connect.
— Staying Connected To Your Teenager: How To Keep Them Talking To You and How To Hear What They’re Really Saying, by Michael Riera, PhD, p. 4