Surrendering To Freedom

We often talk about being submissive and surrendering our will over to God. We might imagine that giving our will to God means giving up our freedom, our individuality. But unlike when earthly dictators and totalitarian regimes demand that we squash everything inside us that makes us unique and conform to their own superior vision and become mere tools or cogs in the machine, God is completely the opposite. He doesn’t want us to give Him our will so that He can turn us into mindless puppets. He wants us to give Him our will so that He can turn us into the best versions of ourselves. Submitting to God means submitting to the piece of God that is in us. We are children of God. We have free will because we inherited it from our Father. But we passed through a veil of forgetfulness and our divinity is cloaked in a mortal tabernacle that does not comprehend the divine. The mortal, human, flawed part of us is afraid of freedom. We don’t want that kind of power or responsibility. We hesitate to give our will to God not because we’re afraid of losing freedom, but because we are afraid He’s going to give us more freedom, more creativity, more strength and power and grace and wisdom than we know what to do with. Becoming like God is scary. Surrendering our whole souls to God means not only giving up all of our weaknesses, but also the excuses those weaknesses provided us as places to hide. God does not want us to trap ourselves behind our own flaws. He wants to free us to a greater degree than we can possibly imagine.