Here’s how. It will be counterintuitive, to begin with, so against your better judgment read a bit further. It’s this: realize that your life is not your own.
This is where Christians ought to have the advantage, but 99 percent of us do not apply the gospel message of following Jesus and therefore miss out on the “abundant life” freely available to us.
For a Christian, their life is “in Christ.”Their life is no longer their own. Sounds cultish. But as soon as we can truly let go of all and not insist on having our own way, the more peace comes rushing right in like a king tide.
The testimony of life itself is that our lives are not our own.
So many things occur against our will and control. The ultimate truth is my life is not my own in death—it has the final say against our wishes most of the time. So often death is a crushing reality. But we face a million ‘deaths’ while we’re alive.
Why would we continue to insist we can control what we can’t? Instead, power for peace, and not just peace, but hope and joy, come rushing into our lives when we have let go of ALL our futile demands.
THE TYRANNY OF DEMAND
We are fooled into thinking—indeed, self-deceived—when we imagine we can demand anything of life, persons, and situations.
We can present our wishes but the moment these blur into demands is the moment we’ve lost our wisdom and have entered the folly of futility.
Demands make people tyrants. The irony of this tyranny is the self-absorbed concept that “I’m entitled” to demand but others are not. Think of a demanding person in your life; do they allow others to be demanding of them? No, they don’t. They are miserable and they are miserable to live with.
THE CHALLENGE OF ULTIMATE PEACE
There is a consistent way to peace that works—every time.
When we go the audacious way of accepting our lives are not our own—besides the freedom of choice to do the good things we can—we actually come close to perceiving the potential about ourselves. We can unlock and mobilize.
Like becoming free of the self-concept that “I’m a fake,” “my dreams are dashed,” “I’ll never be good enough,” “I can never forgive myself,” “I’ll never live up to their expectations,” etc. Only when those narratives lose their power will we walk free into the narrative of what is possible.
We stand in our own way far too often when we insist on taking control of situations and people, vouching for and advocating for ourselves.
ACCEPTING AND CREATING DESTINY
Some of our destiny is in our own hands, a lot of it actually. The biggest determinant of our destiny is our attitude toward those things that occur that we cannot change.
This is a jarring irony. By getting out of our own way, we create pathways for not only peace but for a gracious destiny to unfold.
What loss is it that we don’t receive what we otherwise would love? If it wasn’t meant to be ours, why is the rest of our life derailed?
There are so many of these things, so why would we subject ourselves to obvious levels of disappointment and despair?
Being at peace with our world and in our life is up to us.
The journey unfolds when we accept that our lives aren’t fully ours—part of us belongs to others, part of us belongs to the unknowable aspects of an ever-unfolding life, and for Christians, there is a beautiful paradox that our freedom comes from surrender.
Giving up what we cannot control wins for us peace and freedom. There is no better way to the life abundant.
This is an updated edition of a post originally published on Tribework
Featured Image by Alex Sidlinskiy from Pixabay
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