“I surrender. I trust you.”

This was the new prayer, the mantra. Through tears and anguish, I realized I was no longer praying the same sobbing, begging prayer that had been on my heart for the last 5 years. Now it was this, over and over: I surrender. I trust you. I surrender. I trust you. The requesting prayer I regularly churned over was not the first thing coming to the tip of my tongue. Something was different. Certainly not indifference, no - I was not without the same want and desire. I had not given up, had not set it aside. The ache was still real, and the request was the same…yet I had stopped praying the other prayer. Why?

I wasn’t defeated – I was yielded.  

Five years is a long time to yearn. But I don’t think the Bible discourages us from yearning. Scripture is full of people experiencing the deep ache of being separated from friends, spiritual communities, or family (Deut. 28:32, 2 Cor. 7:7, Gen. 31:30). The New Testament emphasizes yearning for Heaven and true home (2 Cor. 5:2, Heb. 13:14, Phil. 1:23). Whether we are longing to get out of a season of suffering, wishing for a relationship restored, for the grieving to pass, or an ache to ease, longing itself does not put us outside the company of God.

Jesus Christ Himself asked if there could be another way.

In the garden of Gethsemane, Jesus knows what is coming. He knows the cross is ahead of Him, and Matthew 26:39 tells us that He prays, "My Father, if it is possible, may this cup be taken from me." Jesus expresses what He wants honestly. He doesn't hide His desire behind religious language. He doesn't act as though suffering doesn't matter because He knows God has a purpose in it. He asks for another way, and then He says, "Yet not as I will, but as you will."

That's surrender.

And I think sometimes we've imagined surrender as reaching a place where we stop wanting, like it’s an object that goes from sitting in our hand to sitting “over there”. Surrender is more about coming to a resigned peace in the pain. Holding the thing, the desire, but with a completely open hand so God can do with it what He wants.

Surrender is being able to say, "Father, this is what I want," and "Father, I trust You," in the same prayer.

That is, of course, a difficult level of vulnerability. If we close our fist around something, at least it feels like we're protecting it. We can build our lives around getting it. We can interpret every coincidence as a sign. We can bargain with God. We can tell ourselves that if we're faithful enough, eventually He has to say yes.

But then the desire isn't simply something we're carrying anymore - it starts carrying us.

So, what does this mean for us today?

Our desires are likely radically different from Jesus – our circumstances are nowhere near the same – but the principle of His prayer is what we can take away: Christ expressed a real desire while simultaneously submitting that desire to the Father’s will. Maybe there's something we're holding right now that we desperately want. We don't have to shame ourselves for wanting it, don't have to call a good desire selfish just because it hasn't been fulfilled. And we don't have to pretend we're not disappointed when prayer doesn't produce the answer we hoped for. We can bring the whole desire to God. We can ask boldly, grieve honestly…

…and keep our hand open.

An open hand doesn't mean we've stopped caring. It means we've stopped demanding that this particular thing become the condition for whether our life can still be good, whether God can still be trusted, or whether we can still become who He's calling us to be.

Surrender doesn’t mean we never wanted it – it means we trust God with what happens next.