Peaceful Surrender

Until the last 8 or 9 years, if someone had said to me, "I feel like God is really talking to me .... " I'd probably have looked at them half-cockeyed and wondered if I needed to sift their next statements through the 'living-on-another-planet' filter. But, as I alluded, things have changed in recent years.

Somewhere along the road in my mid-20s, when all appeared to be going fabulously in my life (great pr career, super healthy, traveling, lots of friends and parties), I realized I was empty. Very empty. And worse, with dozens of people close to me, I felt oddly alone. Until one night on my balcony in my one bedroom apartment in North Carolina. That's when God and I had our first real conversation. But really, He wasn't saying much ... I was the one talking ... and pleading for relief from my misery. I knew life had to hold much more for me. It just had to.

That was the night that I finally said, you take my life Lord, you do it. Because I'm over it. I'm tired of trying to be all that everybody else wants me to be. I'm tired of running so hard and so fast ... to where??! I'm tired of trying to live in this world of grays when all the gray just rebelled against the truth in my very soul. I'm sick and tired of being solely accepted by whether I had sent a perfectly edited document to my client or by how big my butt is or was last month ... I'm tired of going through relationship after relationship that always seemed to leave me wanting more ... Worst of all, I'm tired of making such self-destructive choices, but I don't seem to be able to stop myself ...

It was that cool September night, with tears running down my fair cheeks that I gave up on being CEO of my life ... I was getting nowhere fast and began to realize that if I didn't figure something out that though the pictures in my life might look pretty and fun to those on the outside, the one in the pictures would be sad - plain and simple.

"Surrendering' is what you'll hear many people in Christian circles call it. Surrender. It almost sounds like a battle? In truth it was. It was a battle between God and me to determine who would be god of my life. Him or me. At that point, I figured I didn't have much to lose. He supposedly created this world, so shouldn't He know better than I? I hoped so. I was finally running the white flag in and laying it all at His feet.

Fortunately for me, over the course of the next 6 or 7 years, He led my feet to another path that was not completely different from the one I was on, but was much more peaceful, and joyful and FULL. Really full. And for the first time in my life the cliche of 'peace' was no longer a cliche, I actually possessed it. And fear no longer controlled me; rather, it just knocked on my door every so often.

And now, 12 years later, as I sit in my home, with my husband close by and my little one sleeping soundly in the room down the hall, I feel an enormous amount of gratitude to God. He'd been chasing me for a long time, but it took some really tough times for me to slow down long enough to let Him catch me and show me all the beauty He had in store for me.

But thankfully, He did.

Peace to you ...