The only thing to do is surrender.
That means letting go and letting God take your life in His hands.
There’s no use in fighting. It’s useless to be at war with yourself and God.
If you want to be a childlike soul, you must decide to set down your worries once and for all. You must truly believe that God is taking care of you all the time.
You are too complicated when you always doubt. It makes you torn up by thoughts of God’s goodness—you don’t think it’s really true that God is good.
If you surrender, you will see your life transformed into something beautiful.
You can’t produce the beauty by trying to control.
The love in your heart will make you shine. It comes through when you stop worrying and let yourself be loved.
Let go by letting your heart go. It just means you need to trust and let your worries slide away.
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The answer’s simple. If it gives you peace, and makes you smile, it comes from God.
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What makes a person pure of heart?
The prophets have said that the pure of heart will see God’s face. If, then, we wish to see God’s face, it would be well to make our own hearts pure.
But how?
The person who is pure of heart truly longs to see God. That is all. Her other desires fall away because her heart is longing for God.
Great post, Elizabeth. I completely agree that surrender has value, basically for the same reason that humility has value. Of course, surrender has to coexist with maintaining a healthy self respect for our own ability to reason the truth and the principles upon which we base our actions. Otherwise, what one sees as surrendering to God may well be surrendering to a false envisioning of God. Although, having self respect without having pride can be a difficult task. Maybe the ideal of the “childlike soul” you mention can create a means of reaching that goal.
Thank you, Turner. You make a really interesting and important point. The contradictions/delicate acts of balance you mention are questions I continually struggle with. It can be very scary to trust yourself–or to trust your experience of God–for fear of being prideful or disillusioned. In fact, this fear can be incredibly crippling and keep you in a morass of never making any decisions or taking any actions at all. In my opinion, this activity–keeping you stuck in fear of not pleasing God or being able to trust that you can really hear Him–is the devil’s cunning way of turning your faith against you. Unfortunately, it afflicts me to a significant degree and brings me much distress.
In my case, the childlike approach to spirituality is something of a lifesaver. For one thing, it helps me to avoid going insane when I’m stuck in cycles of trying to perfectly figure things out and reconcile concepts of self-respect, pride, humility, maturity, childlike simplicity, human independence, total dependence on God, etc., in my daily life. The childlike approach tells me: “Don’t get hung up on mental analysis of your morality. The answers won’t come that way. Turn everything over to God and He will straighten out the rest. Your surrender to God is an act of freedom and, instead of leading you to self-debasement, it will help you to see the light of God that dwells in you and empower you to act with and through His grace and use the gifts (like reason, intelligence, creativity) He brings to life in you.”
What do you think? How do you reconcile a healthy self-respect with an attitude of humility and total dependence on God? You said that surrender has value “basically for the same reason that humility has value.” What did you mean by that? What is the value of humility, in your opinion?
Thank you for your prompt reply, Elizabeth. I’m sure everyone (myself included) struggles with balance issues like these to some extent. But I don’t think an honest person should experience severe distress over whether or not their actions are sufficiently compliant with God’s will. While we should all be continually trying to know God better, on a more local level, our obligation to love only runs so far as our present understanding allows us to know how that abstract idea translates into action. I know that at various points in my life, I’ve considered certain actions to be ethical that now I wouldn’t consider as such. But so long as I’m always acting in consistency with my present understanding of my nature as a being created in God’s image, I trust that I won’t break my connection with divine grace. It seems to me that the “childlike approach” you mention has a similar basis in trust.
To be honest, I don’t think I’m great at maintaining my self-respect and humility at the same time, without ever crossing that line into pride. It seems like whenever I have good self-esteem, I can’t determine if that’s healthy or prideful. Sometimes, it seems to help not to actively ponder my self-worth. If I make a point to consistently do things that nourish the spirit and the body, I believe that I will maintain my self-worth without having to think that I’m worthy.
I haven’t thought about this a great deal, but I suppose I would be inclined to define intellectual surrender as the action resulting from the heavenly virtue of humility. So in that way, I’d say the merit of the action is derivative of the merit of the virtue. In my personal opinion, one of the primary values of humility is that it enables faith in a source of good external to ourselves. And when we recognize our limitations, it enables us to aspire to a higher ideal. You referenced earlier the beatitude “blessed are the pure of heart, for they shall see God.” Perhaps this purity of heart and the ability to see God are consequences of humility.
“Sometimes, it seems to help not to actively ponder my self-worth. If I make a point to consistently do things that nourish the spirit and the body, I believe that I will maintain my self-worth without having to think that I’m worthy.”
This may be the key: leaving aside constant navel-gazing in favor of healthy self-forgetting. Difficult for me to accomplish, though! Guess it helps if you’ve found your “passion” in life: something that absorbs your attention into something above and beyond yourself.
In any case, thanks for sharing your thoughts, Turner. I hope you’re having a happy Easter!