The Faith to Release
Cast all your anxiety on him because he cares for you.
I Peter 5:7 NIV
Our scripture today calls for action! This is not a verse of passivity. We participate by actively releasing or casting, literally turning over to God what is not ours. The things we are not meant to control are to be given to God. They are His responsibility, and He can be fully trusted with each person and/or situation we need to let go of and release the burden of control….because He cares for you.
However, the word control does seem to conjure up a lot of different feelings and emotions from people…..but why is that? I can tell you as a therapist that virtually everyone struggles with the need to either control someone or something in their life. When someone feels like they are under the control of another person in their life the issue of control brings on deeper feelings of isolation, helplessness, loss of identity and painfully, sometimes even paralyzing fear. And then there are others that must go through the daunting frustration of watching a loved one being controlled by someone else and lacking the ability to do anything about it. Given all these examples, I think it’s fair to say, humans struggle to release control. We seem to have a false sense that somehow control equals security. However, over time, we soon realize nothing could be further from the truth.
By trying to control the people and/or circumstances around us our lives have become more anxiety-ridden, fear-based, chaotic, exhausting, and the list could go on and on…all of which make us feel like we are losing control, the very opposite of being in control.
But God tells us to release our burdens, situations/circumstances and people to Him because we were never designed to carry His load. Playing God is an exhausting role, if you’ve tried it, and we all have, you know. And as ridiculous as it may sound, have you ever tried to tell God what to do? That doesn’t work either. As hard as it is to even imagine, when we act before we ask God, we, in essence, play God. That would explain how, before too long, we become burdened and heavily yoked, feeling the weight of the world on our shoulders! We’re trying to control everything and everyone…and it’s exhausting. It is simply not our business to do so. And for many, it becomes like a metamorphosis of sorts when one is changed by the release of control, and starts to feel a “transformation” or a “changing of the guards,” so to speak, from a me-controlled heart to a God-controlled heart.
Knowing that God knows all things and is steady, secure and safe, we can trust Him with the people and things that we were trying to carry on our own and have faith that He will do what is best.
By learning the process of releasing to God what we cannot change we begin a faith journey of trust that demands a deeper abiding in Christ than we have ever known. And we gain this deeper abiding, ironically, by letting go.
-Excerpt from “Faith Love Forgiveness” by Susan Goss