Let go and trust God

What if it was possible to relax and let go? I’ve had glimpses of this kind of state. Now let me tell you about it.

I’ve reached sort of a turning point in my life. I’m not over the top yet, but something has seriously began to shift inside of me. Something that I know is the destiny for everyone.

There are still parts of me that are resisting. That want to make things hard. That do not want to follow the natural flow of life. That still want to think my way through everything. Even though I’m more and more seeing how absolutely limited and deceptive my thoughts are. I’m not the little silly voice inside my head. I know this. 

I know that it’s time for us to stop being afraid. God is in control. He’s always been. And he’ll act through us if we just let him. He could force his will on us. He has that power. But he never will. We have to let go and allow. And here I’m going to discuss how we do this. 

In the end, this cannot be conveyed in its fullness through words. It’s so simple and easy, and yet so difficult. And it’s right in front of us. In fact, it’s closer to us than we are to ourselves.

If we want to hand our lives over to God, we need to practice present moment awareness or mindfulness. If someone says that mindfulness is bad because it didn’t originate in Christianity, please don’t listen to them. They are stuck in their silly little thoughts. Their egos. Their thoughts are telling them that what their thoughts are telling them must be right. But one single experience of real truth will prove the limitation of such thinking beyond any doubt.

Mindfulness, in essence, is just about bringing awareness to the present moment. And when we do that something begins to shift. Just be here now! When we start doing this in the beginning, we will notice that our attention starts to drift. This is because we have learned this throughout our lives. We have learned to be caught up in our thoughts. 

But mindfulness is not what this post is about.

What I want to talk about here is handing our lives over to God. In every given moment. In every moment we can choose to trust or live in fear. If we want to resist or let go. 

Jesus was the ideal that we should always strive for. He came here to show us the way. And in one way or another, he’s promised that he will return. But when Jesus came here 2000 years ago, he came in a way that basically no one expected. What if it’s the same when he returns? 

Jesus told us that his will and the will of the father are one. In fact, he told us that he and the father are one (Joh 10:30). 

This doesn’t have to be hard. Circumstances might make things hard at times. But following Jesus should make it easier to handle whatever circumstances come our way. Jesus came her to set us free. For real. So if we feel that what Jesus taught is not making us free, we are not reading his message correctly. If you treat the Bible like a stale rulebook, where you constantly limit yourself from anything that might offend God, even if it’s not clearly spelled out in the Bible, you are reading it all wrong. I think that the example of Christian rock and metal is such a telling one. If someone says that it’s wrong, I just stop listening immediately, because I know that the words come from a mind that is caught up in thoughts. When you realize that it’s possible to argue for just about anything and make it sound plausible, you are one step closer to breaking free from the prison of your thoughts.

What Jesus offers is real freedom. This while life lived according to our own wills is not real freedom. This kind of life is a prison of our lower natures. For some it’s a dirty prison full of stench. One that has bars of rusty iron. For others, it’s a shiny, clean prison with bars of gold and all the comforts you could ask for. But it’s still a prison.

But we don’t have to fear the prison either. The prison is an illusion. You can look at the Bible as a type of instruction manual for life on the earth. But not an instruction manual that is a rulebook that you have to decipher. The really important stuff is pretty straight forward: Don’t judge. Cultivate love. Be honest and respectful. Examine your own behavior instead of pointing out the faults of others. That sort of stuff. 

If you don’t follow the instruction manual, all that happens is that life doesn’t work properly. And so you’re caught up in the illusory prison.

Again, what we need to do is to choose God and to trust God in every given moment. There is no other way forward. We need to choose trust in our personal lives. And we need to choose trust when it comes to the events that unfold in the world. It’s not easy when we witness all of the chaos that is taking place. But whatever the circumstance, all is ultimately in God’s hands. The worst that can happen on a personal level is that we die. And the worst that can happen on a global level is that the world ends. If this happens, it’s the will of God. Instead of resisting, forcing and being afraid, why not just try to figure out what God wants, do that and leave the rest to God?

Where do we focus? What thoughts do we choose?

I have a lot of happiness in my life already. I have a rich spiritual life, a wife that I love, who loves me and the same goes for friends and family. I’ve also done some serious soul-searching, dealt with a lot of emotional issues and done a lot of inner healing over the past years. And as forty is approaching my body feels healthier than ever. I also know that what is really important, is the spiritual life and the relationship with God and other people. These are aspects of life that don't cost anything and that we always can do things to cultivate further.

So I really have a lot in my material life to be happy about. More than I thought before I wrote it down actually. 

But career-wise I’m not at all where I want to be and my financial situation is a mess. And I've attached undue importance to these things, partially because the world says that you should. I've done this at the expense of being happy and grateful for what I do have and even felt like a failure because of it.

And maybe it is because I don’t focus on all the other good things in my life that these things are a mess. Because maybe my sense of lack drains the energy that I need for fixing my career and causes me to spend money on things that I don’t need.

My initial question for this post was: can pain be turned into something positive? Then I realized that the post was really about something else. But I still believe that we can gain something positive from pain. And this really also has to do with where we focus.

For one, the pain of the temporal can motivate us to turn towards the eternal. Towards God. When the pain of living in the past or the future becomes unbearable, it can help driving us to the only place where we can find release: The present moment.

Mental pain is always alerting us to something. Maybe some attitude needs to change. Or we need to take a look at our habits. I’ve lately become painfully aware that I’ve become a bit too comfortable in my circumstances. I’ve also not taken care of my relations to other people properly.

When we feel pain, we have a choice of whether we want to try and escape it or face it. If we try to escape it, it will wear us down and we will start moving towards apathy. But if we instead face it, it can be a catalyst for growth. “Something isn’t working so I’m going to resign to it and pretend that it isn’t there” and “Something isn’t working so I’m going to do my best to change it” are two completely different mindsets with radically different behaviors attached to them. And just like with where we focus, it all begins with which thoughts we allow to enter our minds.

Gratitude

I’ve recently come face to face with my own lack of gratitude. I’ve realized that I’ve often focused on the negative, rather than the positive things in my life. I live an amazing life with my wife, even if it’s not always what I had expected. In all the ways that counts, it’s so much more.