“And he was withdrawn from them about a stone’s cast, and kneeled down, and prayed, Saying, Father, if thou be willing, remove this cup from me: nevertheless not my will, but thine, be done.” (Luke 22:41-42). The reason that Jesus Christ was able to do the impossible and suffer all of the pain and anguish and heartache of billions of souls is because He made sure that this was not about Him. He came to Earth not to do His own will, but the will of His Father. He followed this practice throughout His entire life, but especially at those moments in Gethsemane when He was in the very deepest of agonies. By repeatedly saying “Not my will, but thine, be done”, Christ was reminding Himself that He wasn’t doing this for Himself. He wasn’t doing this because He was the Chosen One, or because He had to prove that He was perfect. He was able to endure infinite suffering because He removed His will from the equation. This wasn’t about Him. This was about His love for His father and for all of His brothers and sisters. Yes, personally, He didn’t want to continue. If it was up to Him, He would have tapped out. It wasn’t fair for Him to have suffered so much, especially since He hadn’t done anything wrong, and He was stuck treading in the winepress all alone. But Jesus Christ did not let those thoughts into His heart. He did not focus on His own pain, but on the glory of His Father’s plan, and on the joy that all of His brothers and sisters would feel to be freed from death and sin. We are all going to face situations that are not fair and where it seems like we are carrying more than we ought to and more than we can bear. We can indeed get through it, but not if we hold onto the idea that our will matters most. We are weak. Our will wavers. Our faith fails. But if we surrender our will to our Heavenly Father, then it’s His problem. We can continue to suffer and to crawl forward one inch at a time and trust that our Heavenly Father will sort it all out in the end. And He will! We are only doubling down on our anguish and cutting our limited strength in half by choosing to lay claim to our own will. The bitter cup cannot pass from before us. It will cost us everything to drink it, but if we try to make it about us, then we have to fight with ourselves while also still having to drink the cup. But if we surrender our will to our Heavenly Father’s, then we also put the outcome of our trial in His power, and our eventual triumph is guaranteed, just as the Savior’s was when He chose to give up His will and let His Father’s will be done.
