The Life of Surrender

Parenting recently has been a little bit brutal.  I have one child with emotional breakdowns and some attitude flaring out of nowhere, I have one child that likes to attack the youngest and has some passive/aggressive defiance going on, and my youngest abounds in energy and is into EVERYTHING!  It is easy to feel deflated at the end of the day thinking that our parenting is getting nowhere.  Usually I will then turn to my parenting resources.  I absolutely love reading parenting books and moms blogs and getting tips on how to combat bad behavior.  While I love getting a new tip and having it work, usually it is short lived.  I think I can get lost in all the parenting resources and become very confused on what I should be doing for discipline.

Yesterday was pretty rough.  I would like to say that it ended wrapped up in a pretty bow and we all had feel good feelings at the end of the day.  That is not what happened, but I felt less pressure and stress on myself because I spent the morning throwing my hands in the air and saying, “God, I can’t do this alone.  I have no idea what to do with this child right now and I am turning this situation over to you.”  I don’t feel like an answer came floating down from Heaven and I don’t feel like I am on top of my parenting game, but I do feel like the situation is out of my hands.  (Which it is anyway!)  I feel so much better when I place my children’s lives into their creator’s hands.

Parenting has been something that I will occasionally turn over to God and then I will get a little too self-reliant and take it back.  It is very illogical to think that I can do better for my kids than God can, but I think that is what I am saying by my behavior.  By taking back my parenting worries, joys, concerns, etc, I am taking God out of it and setting myself up for failure.

I am not saying that having a program, schedule, or using parenting resources is a bad thing.  I believe that God sends us these things for support in our lives.  What I am saying is that we need to relinquish our illusion of control over our children’s lives to God.  After we have turned over our cares for our children in prayer, then we can listen and see how God wants us to proceed.  God may then have us implement a schedule, program, or use a parenting resource, but we can’t replace God with these things.

When I think about my ultimate goal as a mother, it would be to have my children come to know Jesus and love him with all their hearts.  I pray this over my kids mostly everyday.  I know that only God is in charge of what my children believe.  When I turn them over to Him daily, then I know that they are in His hands and he will bring them to Him.  No parenting book, diet, family rule book, or schedule is going to enter my children’s hearts like Christ can.  I need to remember to go to Him before anything else, and that is the best parenting tip I could give to anyone.

I have been thinking recently about my sinful nature and how it manifests itself in my life.  I believe that we are all programmed to sin in a certain way.  For me, I put comfort in front of Christ.  I will go to great measures to make myself comfortable.  In fact, I sometimes think if I could lay in a nice comfy blanket all day everyday I would have it made!  The truth is, I wouldn’t have it made.  While it would feel great to lay in a blanket all day, at the end of the day I would have feelings of guilt for not getting anything done in my day.

I feel like God has been telling me recently to take the hard road instead of the easy one.  I know the easy road looks really appealing in the moment, but it will end up leaving you with feelings of emptiness.  Taking the hard road can look different for everyone.  Taking the hard road could look like doing that good deed even though you know you aren’t going to get the credit for it, sacrificing your own comfort to help someone out, forgiving people for wrongdoing, and a million other examples.

In my life, I feel like taking the hard road looks like not drinking 700 Mt. Dew’s per day to combat tiredness and my artificial feeling of comfort.  Being a mother of 3 there are not as many times in my day where I can kick back and relax like I was able to in the past and it can feel really hard to stay present and in the moment with my children when I want to take a few minutes to myself to kick back and relax.  The big thing I have been working on this year has been to surrender my feelings over to Christ.  When I start to feel jealous, angry, lazy, self-deprecating, or filled with worry, I think the hard road is to surrender those feelings to Christ rather than to wallow in them.  There are many times in my day when I don’t “feel” like making a meal, doing the laundry, or playing with my kids.  I do know that I will benefit from fighting through those feelings in prayer and just doing them.

Taking the hard road has one huge advantage and that is being connected with our Lord and Savior.  I believe that Jesus is still with me when I take the easy road, but I need him way more when I take the hard road.  When we face challenges of any sort, he is there to work through it with us and his power is made perfect in my weakness. (2 Corinthians 2:9)

The Compassion International Bloggers network gave a writing prompt in late December and I am just getting around to writing about it now.  I will use the busy mother of 3 excuse for that one :).  They said to write about one word that you want to focus on in the coming year.  I did some praying about it and I felt that God was asking me to give up the illusion of control in my life.  I say illusion because that is what control is.  In reality, I don’t have control over anything, but I like to pretend that I do.  I finally landed on the word surrender for 2016.

The word surrender terrifies me for a number of reasons, but I truly believe that this was what I am to work on in 2016. One of the reasons it is terrifying is because I want to be comfortable, and surrendering my life to Christ doesn’t sound comfortable. Peter and I were joking about some words that we think describe us and he said adventure for himself, and I replied with the word snuggly for myself.  We both laughed because we know that comfort is very important to me.  I think the reason that I want to control everything is because I think it will help me feel more comfortable.  When in all actuality I think trying to control everything makes me less comfortable and more stressed out/worried about stuff.  So, in a way, surrendering may make me feel more comfortable after all!

When I knew that surrender would be my word, I started wishing that I would have an easier word like peace.  What I have come to understand is that I will be gaining peace by surrendering.  My life is not peaceful when I am running all over like a crazy person trying to figure everything out for myself.  I worry constantly that something terrible will happen to my kids, Peter, myself, or extended family.  I also worry about my children’s feelings, plans for our family, and the future in general.  I am not in control of any of these things.  I could try to control everything but I will fail EVERY SINGLE TIME.  I don’t get to control the way my children are treated by their peers or how they feel about themselves.  I don’t get to have all of  my plans fall into alignment like I want them to.  I don’t actually control anything.  The more I realize how powerless I am and how powerful the God that I serve is the more peaceful my life will become.

Surrendering everything to Christ is going to take a lot of prayer.  My first instinct is to try to take over in situations where I feel powerless, and I know that it will be necessary to be on my knees way more frequently than what my life has previously modeled.  Prayer is the way that I can understand what it is that God is asking of me.  I am ashamed to say that I haven’t always spent a lot of time thinking about God’s plans for my life and I have spent countless hours trying to make Krystal’s plans work.  I can definitely relate to Solomon when he said, “Meaningless, meaningless.”  All of Krystal’s plans are meaningless without seeking what God wants.

So with that I feel it is going to be a loaded 2016.  I understand that as a Christian I should have this surrender thing down pat since it is pretty much the foundation of our faith, but I struggle.  I am looking forward to leaning on God, and being in good communication with God through His Word and through prayer.  I know that many trials can and will come my way, but my prayer is that I will still be standing because I am building my faith on a firm foundation.