Don’t Rock the Boat pt. 3

The Solution

How does one solve the problem of feeling "out of control"? I think that, as I mentioned before, the common solution is to treat the presenting problems and thereby avoid the deeper ones. You see it everywhere: marriage is bad, get a divorce; don't like your job, find a new one; problems with friends, stop calling them; emotional problems, anti-depressants.

[SIDEBAR: Anti-depressants are great. And there are a lot of situations where you need them to level you out so that you can deal with the deeper issues. There are some people who simply have to have them because their body doesn't produce the chemicals that they need. I'm for them, even if what I'm going to say makes it sound like I'm not.]

So, how do you get around the presenting problems and get to the root? I think that step one is Awareness. If all you do is look at issues in isolation, you'll never see anything but the surface. It's only through connecting the dots that you can figure out what is driving. Or it's like when someone gets divorced multiple times and you stop them and say, "hmm, did you ever notice that what each of these relationships had in common was you? Maybe there's something to that."

What I'm finding is that the solution is not to deal with these surface things. Or at least, not to try and resolve them immediately, because to do so would mask my need for a deeper soul change. Rather, the best thing for me to do is bear them or even lean more heavily into them (as I said two days ago, "I’m turning my sails and heading straight for the rocks because it may hurt to crash, but that’s the only way to get me to give up control.")

Instead of trying to control my way through the little things I have to realize that my deeper need is to trust God to guide me through them. That means praying for strength, praying for patience, praying for my need to control things to be taken away. In short, I've got to learn to rely on God rather than on myself and, for now, that means not trying to fix things in my own power. It means it may be more difficult in the moment, but it's the only way to grow.

For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named, that according to the riches of his glory he may grant you to be strengthened with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith--that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.

Ephesians 3:14-19