when will I surrender?

“Come, let us bow down in worship;

let us kneel before the Lord who made us.

For he is our God,

and we are the people he shepherds, the flock he guides.”

~Psalm 95

Today I read in "Courage to Change" a reflection that culminated with the sentence: 

“Heaven forbid I should surrender, accept my discomfort, and pray for guidance.”

Surrender. Accept. Pray for guidance. I am struck by the simplicity and utter truthfulness of this formula. I am back to the first step, surrender. Always surrender. So today this is exactly what I do. I get on my knees and say out loud, 

“Into your hands, Lord, I surrender my body. Into your hands, I surrender my mind. Into your hands I surrender my spirit, my will, my desires, my worries, my hopes, my fears. I surrender my ideas and image of who I am, and I beg you to show me what you see. I surrender all of me. Grant me O my Lord the ability to accept, and, please guide me. Show me the way.”

Just saying the words, calls to mind a period in my life not so long ago when I struggled with surrender from a different and more poignant point of view--when my chronic joint pain and fatigue was in full flare up. 

After kneeling that night in prayer, I wrote in my journal:

My knees throb; uncomfortable in even the short time it takes me to pray. Before getting up, however, I hang my head and let myself cry. It’s hard to explain what’s going on inside me without sounding overly dramatic.  

It’s not that I can’t do it without God’s help—this I know to be true, but it’s not enough.  

It is rather that I acknowledge that I am literally unable, based on my own will, to live like this at all—and if I am to go on living today, and tomorrow, and the day after—it can only be resting in God’s guiding hand.