Explore The Monastic Rhythms That Make for Healthy LeadershipSample

Learning to Surrender our Lives to God’s Care

Vow number three for the Benedictines was a commitment to “obedience.” For the monks, this was the highest expression of trust in a human representative of Christ, the Abbot—the leader of the monastery. Our world does not generally require this level of obedience to a human leader, yet the challenge to submit ourselves to God’s trustworthy rule remains. 

At a human level, we want to know if we are safe to surrender… and life doesn’t always feel safe. In today’s passage, Jesus invites us to consider how fully God understands our needs and faithfully meets them. He doesn’t promise that we won’t experience pain; instead, he promises to be radically present to us and care for us completely within the painful experiences that life inevitably brings. In fact, he urges us to stop avoiding or numbing our pain and actually be present ourselves to what hurts so that we can meet him in it and actually deepen our faith as a result of walking through the hard places.

I believe this is part of what Jesus had in mind by calling us to “seek first his kingdom and his righteousness”—to trust him enough to engage him in the hard place, expecting the goodness of his character and the redemptive purposes of his kingdom to triumph through hardship. Our heavenly Father knows what we truly need and will provide it despite every obstacle.

This hope is what leads us to obey by surrendering ourselves completely into God’s loving, capable hands. What will this look like for you today?