Out of Control and Letting Go

Since mid-August this blog has been looking at why “Letting Go and Letting God” is both so hard and so necessary. We reach a point when we cannot go any further in our own strength. Like Joseph and Abigail, in the Bible, we find ourselves at loose ends because everything is unraveling. However, an unraveled place in life can be a perfect place for God to start something new. At other times we feel like we’ve reached the end of our rope. Despite advice to hang on, we must eventually let go. When that happens, we fall into the arms of the Living and Loving God.

Letting go and falling into God’s arms means we are no longer ‘in control’ of our life. That can be pretty scary. Most of us like to maintain the illusion that we are ‘perfectly fine’ and ‘in control’. God doesn’t work that way, though. When our lives are neatly ordered and we are certain that we know the way the road is going, is often the time that something happens and we find that our lives are ‘out of control’. That happened to Esther in the Old Testament and Paul in the New Testament.

A lot of us learned about Esther in Sunday School. She was a young Jewish girl in Babylon/Persia (during the time when the Jews were in exile in that country). King Ahasuerus (Xerxes I) becomes angry with Queen Vashti and on the advice of his counselors gathers all the young women in the area to choose a new queen. Esther was one of them-and her world is turned upside down when she wins the contest and “he made her queen instead of Vashti.” All is going well…until…Haman, one of the kings advisors decides to eradicate all the Jews in Persia. Esther’s uncle, Mordecai, tells her she must intercede with the king to save her people. He tells her “who knows whether you have not come to the kingdom for such a time as this?” (Esther 4:14) She has to let go of control of her life in order to save her people.

Paul, also known as Saul, had his life neatly in order, too. He was, as he claims in his letter to the Philippians, “circumcised on the eighth day, a member of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born of Hebrews; as to the law, a Pharisee; as to zeal, a persecutor of the church; as to righteousness under the law, blameless.” (Philippians 3:5-6) Paul was the perfect Jew and well respected by his peers. Then God steps in and his neatly ordered life is no longer neat or ordered.

Esther and Paul both encountered events in their lives that left them feeling out of control. Esther says, “Go, gather all the Jews to be found in Susa, and hold a fast on my behalf, and neither eat nor drink for three days, night or day. I and my maids will also fast as you do. After that I will go to the king, though it is against the law; and if I perish, I perish.” (Esther 4:16-17) In her time of fasting and prayer, Esther finds the courage to take her life into her hands and go to the king. She also finds wisdom in how to deal with the threat to the Jews. (Read the rest of Esther to see how she does it.)

Paul, after his conversion, was blind until Ananias came and prayed for him, “Then he rose and was baptized, and took food and was strengthened.” (Acts 9:18-19) Later in the letter to the Philippians, Paul notes, “I regard everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things, and I regard them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but one that comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God based on faith.” (Philippians 3:8-11)

Both Esther and Paul discovered what other saints of the faith throughout the ages have learned. They realized that only in Letting Go of control could God really work. They had to be broken in order to allow the Grace of God to shine through.

I recently read a blog post that said in part “I wish I could learn the hard lessons in life without slamming into a wall at 100 mph…but perhaps slamming into a wall shatters the false perfection. Then and only then can God show us the colors and beauty of the pieces of our broken selves…then and only then can God piece them into resurrection.” (I wish I could find the site for you, but I was jumping from blog to blog and it jumped out at me and I copied parts of it into a Word doc without the name of the blog.)

Esther and Paul and many of us have slammed into a wall, or fallen off a cliff, at least once, and discovered that God is there to pick up the pieces and make something even more beautiful out of them.

So, I tell myself, don’t be afraid when life is out of control. God brought beauty to Esther’s life and her courage saved the Jewish people. Paul’s world as a up-and-coming Jewish rabbi was changed into a world traveling evangelist for Jesus Christ. From them we can learn that God is fully in control and can make beauty out of what the blogger called a ‘beautiful mess’.

Paul told the Philippians, “I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his death, if somehow I may attain the resurrection from the dead.” (Philippians 3:11) God shines through our brokenness, but the light cannot shine if we are busy holding onto control instead of letting God act.
One way we try to hold onto control is by proving that we can keep all the 'balls in the air'. We'll look at a couple Bible people who worked hard at juggling all their balls next time.