Today, I found myself reminiscing back to a time when my husband and I were first married. We thought we knew everything and that there was nothing we couldn’t do – including speeding down the highway in a 1965 convertible. Then one day, while driving way too fast just after a heavy rain, we began to spin out of control. It was a divided highway with traffic coming on both sides and a grassy median in between. Our car spun and spun and spun and spun around in that median. In that split second, which seemed like an eternity at the time, I just surrendered myself to the fact that we were both going to be killed. I prayed the quickest prayer ever and remember saying, “Lord Jesus, is it time?” It was that total surrender that took all the fear from me. Did I learn my lesson? Ugh, no – not at 20 years old! I never forgot though the feeling of peace I had when God took control of the car and stopped it within inches of nearly leaving the median and into oncoming traffic.
There have been many times in my lifetime where I have felt that my life was spinning out of control. For instance, there was the time that my husband was sent to Korea during the Vietnam War. I had a baby son, soon to be a year old, and another child on the way. He was gone for 13 months and didn’t see his second son until he was 10 months old. It wasn’t until I surrendered myself to the situation of him being gone, that I felt the spinning stop. Surrender is a beautiful thing, especially when it is the right surrender.
These are just a couple of experiences where total surrender helped me get through a tough situation. The same is true with our relationship with God. He wants our reconciliation, not resolution. Total surrender is reconciling our will to God, which doesn’t automatically resolve our situation. Just like with the words of a song sang by Garth Brooks, “…thank God for unanswered prayer”. Yet, the seemingly “unanswered prayer” was really an answer for it was the right answer!
When times seemingly got to difficult and I couldn’t see my way through I would go for a walk with Jesus. Have you ever done that? It is an amazing experience. I learned to do that as a very young girl coming from an abusive home life with an alcoholic father. There were many closed door secrets, yet I was raised in the church (major contradiction.) How did I turn out loving God? Because at the time, as a young girl, Jesus was all I had and he never failed me! Of course I didn’t go for walks on my own as a young child, but I would go to my back yard and lay in the grass looking up to heaven and just chat with Jesus.
As I grew older and the trials of life would take its toll, I would go for long walks just talking with Jesus each step of the way. OK, it wasn’t just talk it was also shedding of tears and heartfelt pleading! Picture this, it was a time when there were no such things as cell phones, or I-Pods, or MP3. To passersby, it probably seemed a bit crazy seeing a woman walking down the street in tears and talking away when no one else seemed to be around. I would tell Jesus all about my troubles. Most of the time he never changed my situation, but by the time I got home he certainly changed how I felt about the situation. I had an important lesson to learn and growth to happen; somehow I instinctively knew that deep inside of me! When I totally surrendered and yielded to God’s will the spinning stopped.
I want to share a chorus of a meaningful song that my husband and I would sing in our high school youth group. Little did I know that those words would hum through my mind even to this day, some fifty years later!
Have a little talk with Jesus tell him all about our troubles
Hear our fainted cry answer by and by
Feel a little prayer wheel turning know a little fire is burning
Find a little talk with Jesus makes it right
