Relinquishment, not Resignation

Photo by Lina Trochez on Unsplash

“Prayer,” the tall, white-haired, gravelly voiced George Hendry, professor from my graduate school days, once wrote, “is a form of protest with God against reality.”

Protest? The line counters the myth that spirituality makes us just shrug amid life’s situations or the world’s injustices. Prayer will not require us to accept every circumstance with passive composure. A quarrel with our world as we know it can be a great ally in the praying life.

Still, sometimes we need to come to a point where we stop striving, where we work on accepting what is unfolding—not constantly pushing hard against the life we’ve been given.

 I’ve been living with a word that helps me with that: Relinquishment. It’s not the same as resignation. We are not talking about a droopy, “I-couldn’t-care-less-what-happens” outlook.

“Resignation,” as writer Catherine Marshall notes, “lies down in the dust of a godless universe and steels itself for the worst.” Relinquishment, on the other hand, says, I will believe that God has up a divine celestial sleeve some resources I may not see.

If resignation gives up—maybe too soon, relinquishment looks up and out and ahead. One response grows out of discouragement and lack of trust. The other takes the moment at hand and marries it to hope.

I think of Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane, in perhaps one of best-known examples of relinquishment: On the night before his death by crucifixion, we see him in the Garden of Gethsemane praying to his Father, “Take this cup from me. Yet not what I will, but what you will” (Mark 14:36).

But before that poignant acceptance of God’s purposes, he prays, “Abba, Father, everything is possible for you” (verse 36). Was it this conviction that God was Abba—a kind Father—that allowed him to merge his purposes into God’s? Here the persons of the Trinity are in animated conversation—moving toward a real and true acceptance.

And we see that for Jesus, it was not just sheer determination, but also a conviction that a caring, fatherlike God held possibilities in those divine hands. If the worst happened (as it of course it would), even then God would work out some good thing. The Cross would lead to an empty tomb.

Relinquishment, then, is not leaping into some vast cosmic unknown. It is becoming willing to be led by a God who knows us and cherishes us. Who has gone some distance before us. It is to hold lightly our lives, which were first given by a God of love.

When we pray “your kingdom come,” we are not stumbling along with a God of chance or fickleness. We are submitting to a God who has plans of good for us, not for evil. It is to recall that God has resources and plans that will stretch our imaginations.

And this relinquishment work is not a one-time act. Relinquishment is about an ongoing practice.

I like what singer-songwriter-author Strahan Coleman says about a grueling time of crushing chronic illness he endured: “During those years, my life with God became about watching Him, watching life, and accepting who He is. … God never did tell me why I went through what I did. … But He did tell me that He loved me, and I learned to accept that as enough.” Strahan learned.

So we may keep having to practice relinquishment; it takes practice, some days. But into whose hands could we better put our fears and aches than those that belong to a trustworthy, caring God?