A River Pass Named Surrender
Word: Ben Manly
Images: Ellie Manly
The rumors have been getting loud recently. For years I have heard tale of a river that some claim to be found deep in the Great Unknown. The best guides struggle to find a way down its toughest pass. Nicknamed Surrender for its reputation of great peril, it is filled with roaring white waters and treacherous level 5 rapids. Those who are well acquainted with adventure know that the river’s demands are high. But seldom few ever have the courage to truly meet them… At least, that is how the story goes.
Where do I even start? This past year has been full of milestone moments that I will remember for a lifetime. Many of them I wished to write dedicated articles on, but as the year has continued to unfold I’ve noticed a common thread running through all of them. And for now I feel like my soul needs to take them in as a whole.
Everything started in the winter when I bought my first car—complete with haggling salesmen and a fight to cancel a bad insurance policy from the dealer.
From there I moved on to the completion of a massive software project at work in late spring, with efforts toward bug fixes tapering off in the summer.
I also had the privilege of attending 3 weddings this year. Each one permitting the opportunity for a weekend roadtrip in order to join the celebration.
And then the big milestone. I met a woman, got engaged to her, and we had our own wedding in the fall. We moved into our apartment a day later, fashioned it into our home, and then we went on our honeymoon.
Now as the year is coming to a close, I am starting a new job.
Life has been… Full. To say the least. It’s been unmistakably rewarding, and an adventure to behold. But I am exhausted. And I have been exhausted for a long time.
Like Bilbo Baggins says in The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, “I feel stretched. Sort of thin. Like butter that has been scraped across too much bread.” Too much has required my attention for too long. And quite honestly, part of my exhaustion has come from the fact that I expected more of myself than I would have ever been able to give.
I assumed that having so much cause for joy would mean that life was going to be easy for a while. However, I vastly underestimated the serpents hatred of things that are Good, and how persistent he is in his effort to warp them into Curses. Joy, as it turns out, still takes some practice.
The last few years were hard for a variety of different reasons, and each one could be boiled down to the idea of scarcity in some form or another. An unmet desire here and there sticking in my side like thorns in my flesh.
But as I looked ahead at the beginning of the year and saw abundance on the horizon, I felt inadequate in the face of it. I worried that it all tipped on the precipice. And that one misstep on my part would send it all crumbling down. As the joy was slowly warped, a desire to try and prove my worthiness crept in that became almost irresistible.
I call this mindset “Vending-Machine-God.” It is a skewed perception of cause-and-effect where, like the Pharisees of old, I reason that anything bad in my life must be punishment for doing bad. And anything good in my life must be a reward for doing good. It essentially states, “God, you’ll give me what I want if I keep loving you. Won’t you?”
Of course, I know this is not how God actually works. I think, at least on some level most people who are in relationship with Him know this as well. But the soul does weird things when it feels isolated. And the spiritual rain dance of embellished rituals feels like a very natural thing to do.
On the surface, it sounds quite tempting. The “Vending-Machine” perspective offers a promise of safety through the path of control. For if you know all the variables, then you can coerce the results. And nothing can hurt you except, of course, yourself.
Let me tell you though, it is most definitely an illusion. Living life like this is exhausting, and I find myself in constant fear of failure. I am always looking out for ways that life can fall apart—believing that I stand on the edge of oblivion 24/7.
The “Vending-Machine” perspective gives myself too much credit as the sole harbinger of death and good fortune. Putting the weight and impetus in my own hands, instead of where they truly belong in God’s.
The human soul was not designed to carry that kind of weight. After all, to live a life of total control is to live a life of total isolation. No one else can be trusted. Not even myself. Not even God.
Unfortunately, most of the variables do truly lay outside of my control. And so I am left to remain thrown around by the current of the river pass, hapless and helpless to its strength. Unable to secure a submission hold over it.
The only variable that truly remains under my own authority is whether I believe the river flows by God design, or the satan’s.
This is not a Pollyanna call to believe more, or believe harder. As I said, the river roars with white water rapids. When you’re in the middle of it, life hardly seems safe and in control. I was in that place all year. It is the very abundance of the water that was overwhelming.
Yet, this is also not a call to spiritual submissiveness. The hosts of Heaven and Hell do not abide by “Laissez-Faire”—the hands off approach. A war rages on, and there is a role for us to play in the cosmic struggle.
But we are not alone in it either. Surrender is not an order from on high, demanding that we “figure it out,” and simply, “fall in line.” Rather, it is an invitation into partnership. To align our heart with God’s, who is making all things new. Trusting that somehow, someway, the decisions we make are guided and guarded by Abba. Even if those decisions were not the so called “perfect” path to take.
After all, faith is simply trust that has been put into action. Or as Queen Regent Míriel puts it in the show The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power “the way of the faithful is committing to pay the price, even if the cost cannot be known. And trusting that in the end it will be worth it.”
Still, the water does inevitably carry us along. And if you have come to learn that the rivers true name is Life, well then that reality gets a little easier to carry.
Perhaps not perfectly easy—there are still hard passes on the water—but after the current settles, and the waters begin to calm, you can look back and see the pass for what it was. An adventure.
It is here that I rest on the quote that inspired this article. In the movie Doctor Strange, the mystic character known as The Ancient One says “You cannot beat a river into submission. You have to surrender to its current, and use its power as your own.”
It is perhaps the perfect summary quote for the year I had. And thus, the perfect summary quote for this article as well.
This year I often feared that I was on the wrong path. That I was a day late and a dollar short. I doubted that I was good enough, that I had what it takes. And no matter how hard I tried to beat out the river by proving my worthiness to control it, I couldn’t do it.
I lived under a constant fear of what came next instead of an eagerness towards it. Believing that darkness held the upper hand. And that truly, God stared impatiently on. Waiting for me to “get it right.”
But this of course, is where I got it wrong. The reality is that Surrender rests securely in the idea that whatever path we have taken, it is the path we were always meant to be on. It scandalously casts off the idea that there was a right or wrong path to begin with.
I think we get tied down to this idea of a path that is right and wrong, and think that the two aren’t interconnected somehow. Beloved-ness finds the space to trust that even if the path we walked was not the one that we desired, it was still cared for by God. That even the seasons where we walk in our deepest brokenness, misunderstanding, frustration, isolation, and shame, they are still seasons where He was there.
I dare say He even guides us into those moments. Not because he wants us to fail, to sin, or to run away from Him, but because he knows that through that, on the other side of it, He brings us closer and closer into perfect union with Him forever.
In other words, our salvation is not in who we will be, but in receiving Gods love as we are; without memory of the past or concern for the future.
Perhaps we were never meant to prove ourselves to God. Perhaps it was always supposed to be impossible.
What if our current circumstances, and our past memories could never reach far enough to take that one immutable truth away from us. We are Beloved. That is enough.
That would truly be Life indeed.