Who is in charge?

Last night, Fr. Jim Manning challenged us with a simple question: who is in charge of our lives?  It seems to fit this post of last week.

I see it answered in the lives of those whose difficult circumstances are marked by a mysterious peacefulness: a dear friend whose mother calmly passed away yesterday, spared the end stage Alzheimer's devastation that otherwise loomed; a new sister in the Lord who's had to bury three of her daughters due to cystic fibrosis, sharing her powerful testimony of how our loving God ministered to her and each of her dear girls - and to the doctors and nurses who witnessed it - in their last hours in this world.

I see it answered in different ways in my own life.  Yes, I am learning to follow Jesus enough to share how God has delivered me through even my worst moments.  Yet in doing so there remains unknown ahead of me, and it is still a challenge to trust that God's providence will meet our every need.  Too, I struggle to walk in the grace that I believe my Lord would pour more fully into my life.  I have always undercut that grace.  As if to prove my unspoken, unrecognized certainty that I'm not worthwhile, my decisions have reinforced my  unconscious low opinion of myself, over and over again.  I thought that merely being conscious of my poor self-esteem would be sufficient to keep me from manifesting this pattern in my life and allow me to impose my alleged will on my actions.  But I have decades of practice and habit of not walking fully in grace, and now I begin to see that it takes more, and less.  More: trusting in God to fill my lack; less: gutting it out by my own efforts.

For when I am aware of my vulnerability and weakness, and immediately give myself over to God's sufficiency, in peaceful resignation to him I encounter the solution that I've sought for so long.  In this moment, at least, I am finally free to, simply, be.

But only when I truly allow God to be in charge: more of you, Lord, and less of me.