The Threads Followed in the Wilderness

Thread Two: Surrender

When I write this word, I find myself taking a deep internal breath and sighing.

I sigh because surrendering my worries and fears to God felt like both work and rest to me.

Like release and resistance.

The honesty of that admission makes me want to hide my face a little, but it’s true.

I’d like to tell you I quickly surrendered every fear, anxiety, and worry.

But honestly, I didn’t.

And I didn’t because I misunderstood what surrender was asking of me. I thought surrender meant sitting still, or having peace before peace had actually arrived. I thought it meant somehow becoming unbothered by circumstances that were deeply bothering me.

Yet, just as He promised, Jesus continually met me with grace as I worked through my unbelief, my misbelief, and my misconceptions about how I thought I should walk through a hard season.

As I sifted through the chaff of my wilderness season and tried to make sense of what had happened and what was still unfolding, I began discovering unexpected places where God was present.

Unexpected places where faith was growing, where fruit was taking root and where surrender was quietly taking shape.

That, in many ways, is the purpose of this series. To trace those threads backward and see how God was weaving a path toward life and life more abundantly long before I could recognize what He was doing.

My surrendering season was certainly watering the fruit of patience. Or as some translations call it, long-suffering. Long-suffering feels like the more accurate description. It was long, and I suffered.

Scripture became one of the lifelines that carried me through that season.

One passage in particular captures what the wilderness felt like:

“Behold, I go forward, but he is not there; and backward, but I cannot perceive him: On the left hand, where he doth work, but I cannot behold him: He hideth himself on the right hand, that I cannot see him: But he knoweth the way that I take: when he hath tried me, I shall come forth as gold.” — Job 23:8-10

Job understood what I was feeling. I couldn’t see the purpose and didn’t understand why any of it was necessary.

But God knew the way that I took. And in time, I would discover that surrender and patience were doing a deeper work in me than I could perceive while I was living it.

Why Was Surrendering So Hard?

Surrender was so difficult for me because my nervous system had spent a very long time being fed all the wrong fuel.

How does one simply “let go” when all they’ve practiced is holding on tighter and when every instinct says brace yourself?

For much of my life, strength looked like endurance, tightening up, staying steady, pushing and refusing to crumble.

But eventually my fight-or-flight response chose flight. And from that moment forward there was a great deal to do.

I had babies to care for, big moves to make and decisions to navigate. There was so much external doing that stillness… the thing I mistakenly thought surrender would look like, felt almost impossible.

It was so hard to surrender my fears and the tension between what was lost and what was in front of me.

There was much tension until there came a point where my situation felt so bleak, so beyond my ability to control, that there was nothing left to do but surrender to the only paths God was placing in front of me.

As if God was telling me, much like he did with Moses, to use what was in his hand! A Staff!

For me nothing was physically in my hand, but t I had plenty in my heart, in my head, and right in front of me. My Growth Plan devotional was one of those things.

I think about the lepers who asked one another:

“Why sit we here until we die?”

I knew I couldn’t stay frozen. I couldn’t remain parked in grief. So I took “the next right step”.

Then the next.

I surrendered to fully living in the moments God was placing in front of me. Even through the tears and the fog.

As I leaned into prayer and honesty with God, He gave me things to focus my mind and heart on and began opening doors of opportunity.

Doors that I never would have imagined could eventually lead me toward surrender.

Looking back now, I can see that every one of those doors was asking the same question:

Will you trust Me with what’s in front of you, even if you don’t understand what’s behind you?

I remember my second Christmas season alone with four children.

I can still hear myself saying: “The only place life makes sense right now is in the house of God.” So that’s where I went. I volunteered to help set up a Christmas gift-giving event.

I remember standing there organizing presents into categories. I could see my hands moving and my feet walking. It was as if my body had arrived, but my heart and mind were still trying to catch up with this unfamiliar reality.

I was foggy, grieving, and exhausted. And yet, somewhere deep inside I knew something… If I kept serving, I’d stay steady.

Not because service fixed my circumstances.

But because serving gave my pain somewhere to go.

Romans 12:21 says, “Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.” So that’s what I did. I traded my pain for goodness.

Strangely enough, my surrender looked a lot like serving.

I began helping with my parents’ work and ministry.

I worked a few days each week at a friend’s store. I led worship and I showed up, for my gospel community, for my parents and for my kids. This wasn’t busy work.

These were intentional decisions to live instead of languish.

At the time, what I didn’t realize was that these weren’t distractions from surrender. They were expressions of it!

As I participated in one thing, God illuminated the next.

Worship led to friendships. Friendships encouraged boldness. Boldness opened new opportunities.

This thread of surrender had tassels. And I grabbed hold of them wherever I could find them.

For a long time, I wondered whether I could have surrendered better. More gracefully, peacefully and faithfully.

Until one day it hit me. Wait. God honored the surrender of my tears too.

Every tear shed while trying to mother well, serve well, and keep moving forward.

Those tears weren’t evidence that I was failing at surrender. They were part of it!

I shed tears daily, but I also took steps forward in the directions He was pointing toward. . Looking back now, surrender was never one grand decision.

It was a thousand tiny choices. So you see, the thread of obedience got me moving. Surrender kept me moving.

Although that wasn’t what I thought surrender would look like, I continued to surrender as my humanity quivered. And somewhere in the serving, the grieving, the rebuilding, the worshipping, the mothering, the showing up, and the choosing to trust Him one day at a time, patience was quietly taking root.

Not the patience that waits calmly in a grocery store line. The deeper kind. The kind that learns to trust God’s character even when His timing feels mysterious, and his answers seem delayed.

My surrender and patience helped me open up enough to allow hope for a future—even if it wasn’t the future I had planned - to take root.

As I was reflecting on that realization, I suddenly remembered a scripture that perfectly describes what I was trying to put into words:

“Not only so, but we also glory in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope.”
— Romans 5:3-4

There it was.

The very journey I had been tracing through these threads.

Suffering. Perseverance. Character. Hope.

And that’s where we’ll pick up next time.

Thread Three: Hope.

And the fruit of Joy.

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