Several Sundays ago in worship I heard an unmistakable voice. It was louder than a whisper, but only I could hear it. The message was short and sweet: “It’s time.” And I knew deep in my heart what it meant. It’s time to place my voice on the altar. Not to just lay it nicely there to sleep, but to take the ax to it. It’s time to move beyond the waiting. Any longer and I’d no longer be waiting on God, He’d be waiting on me. It’s time to place the dream in the ground.
Surrender is a complex notion. It’s like any big idea that can’t be understood as a mere vocabulary word. It has to be experienced…lived. And this particular action can’t really be experienced without pain. There is no sacrifice without walking the backside of a mountain, the place that turns downward to the valley. Sacrifice hurts. In theory, my love for God turns any sacrifice into no sacrifice. That’s my initial response. It’s my gut response, even my heart’s response, but walking any valley is hard. The ground isn’t level. The road is narrow. The way unknown. The dangers lurking. Sometimes I just want to take it back.
Surrender is no doubt a process. Sometimes we don’t really know what needs laid down. So we sacrifice what we do know, and then find that it still has roots wrapped around other stuff. We bring one thing but it’s only a doorway to another. I’ve found that life can be an endless passageway of surrender. True surrender is a daily dying…a constant work of pulling up roots.
The word surrender means to yield, to give oneself up to the power of another. When we surrender to God, we lay our plans to rest. We hand them over to Him. If you’ve lived long enough you know what it is to place a dream in the ground, to bury it, and watch it die. I’ve sat at the grave of many dreams, in the tension many times. And I know this for certain about God – He has a way of birthing something new in the very same soil. He has a way of producing something similar but somehow completely different and remarkably better. He can do far more with our surrender than we could ever do in our own power.
Surrender is the soil of new life…of a better life, but it doesn’t feel like it in the dying stage. In that stage it feels like trust. It feels like faith: the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things still not seen. That’s where I am. I thought I wasn’t, but I realized this morning that I’m still there.
I placed a thousand…maybe even ten thousand dreams at His feet with this decision. Much of my younger years were consumed with prayers for my singing dreams. God changed my mind, and I grew to be okay with it…I grew to love ministry more. Many of my prayers the last couple of years have been for my voice in general. I pray that my ten thousand dreams at His feet become ten thousand praises…my halleluiah to the God I trust even when I don’t understand.