Snow and Surrender – relinquishing Control

In the last 10 days I’ve seen more snow than in all my 28 years. I’ve certainly not seen 20 cms of snow on Christmas Day before. Snow is beautiful and fun to play in and walk in when you have the time and you don’t need to be anywhere. But when you do it can quite literally be a nightmare! Last weekend my best buddy and I spent much of our weekend at Heathrow airport trying to get her on a flight to Australia. I’ve never seen so many people in one place except for music concerts, and this was a disorderly affair….queues and queues of people waiting for information and not able to do anything about the fact that they couldn’t fly. They said the queue to the local hotel was 2 miles long and you had to wait for four hours for the hope of a taxi. Despite Heathrow saying it wouldn’t open till 4pm we decided to trek down as Virgin said the flights were still due to go, however when check in time came you couldn’t even get into the Virgin part of the terminal. Luckily we had local accommodation with a parking permit so we were able to get ourselves warm and dry. I met a guy who had travelled 6 hours to meet someone who hadn’t got to Heathrow and would have to drive home. Two young girls had been at Heathrow for two days, they were supposed to be getting a connecting flight to Germany from the USA.

My friend and I decided after that experience that we had a love/hate relationship with snow! Snow is OK when you’re not busy, trying to get somewhere and life doesn’t have its complications. When you’re in one place, you’re on holiday and don’t need to get anywhere, you can have play fights and have all sorts of fun! And snow is generally OK for us if it lasts a short time, but if it goes on and on it makes travel difficult – especially at complicated times like Christmas! Snow wouldn’t have caused so much chaos 75 years ago, but because of the means of travel we have nowadays and our ability to go just about anyway in less than a day on a plane; we get extremely frustrated when we can’t go places.

Over this Christmas season I’m reminded again of something else God seems to be doing in this season in my heart…SURRENDERING to him. A big something came along this week which was gut-wrenching for me to surrender to God. But if God asks us to wait, we have to do it…even if it means waiting for a season. I particularly hate surrender because sometimes I like to control things…particularly my future. I like to know what I will be doing next year and to have plans, even though I like spontaneity in other things. Sometimes I think God will show me His will straight away; after all why wouldn’t he want me to know the right path to go? But sometimes in the waiting place He brings us closer. God has reminded me again and again in the last three months that I have to surrender all my plans to him and wait on him. Oh how I hate it sometimes! But you know what? I think I had a breakthrough this week, in that gut-wrenching place of surrender…I think I realised that I’ve come to a place in my relationship with God this week where it was as if I could only say ‘Yes God’ to His will to ask me to wait. After some blubbering I knew there was no ‘No’ left in me. As I was thinking about this I was reminded of a worship song I’ve been listening to by Misty Edwards (You won't relent). The lines are….

“You won’t relent until You have it all (i.e. my heart)

My heart is Yours”

Phew! Sometimes that’s hard. Especially when you don’t know whether the thing you surrendered will be given back to you.

So how does surrender relate to the affect snow has on us??!!!

Well when things are easy we can cope with the snow, we’re not busy, life isn’t complicated. But when things are hard and we have to get somewhere special at a particular time etc…snow is horrid. Similarly, it’s easy to surrender to God when life is easy, but when its not surrender can be gut-wrenching. But in these surrender times I realise God is bringing me closer to Him and that maybe this is what it’s about.

I surrender Jesus…Help me to surrender even when the going is hard. Amen