Lent: Week Seven

"Father, into your hands I commit my spirit"

Control.

Is there any impetus more universal for humans than the desire for control? Every single one of us strives for it. Maybe not in all areas of our lives, but we generally want to be masters of our domains. We expect to be able to choose and dictate the course of our lives. To be able to choose "today I will eat, tonight I will sleep."

In Western life in particular, we choose our foods, cars, clothing, housing, carreer, mates, when we have children, and a thousand other things. We choose our doctors, dentists and insurance. We can set the temperature in the house - sometimes we can even program the thermostat to adjust throughout the day.

There are few things as unambiguously frustrating as the loss of control. When we feel stuck, trapped by forces beyond the grasp of our manipulative hands. We value self-help books because we don't want to cede the control over fixing our own problems.

But we're not in control. Not by a long shot. From time to time, moments beyond our imagining will shove their way into our cloistered, controlled life and force us to deal with that fact. Perhaps an illness created by invisible invaders will make you too sick to walk. Maybe despite all your best attempts, your child decides to rebel anyway. Maybe you're stuck watching loved ones go through problems no hand can fix. Maybe you have to go to work at a job you hate day after day to provide for a family that barely acknowledges that you're running yourself ragged for them.

Death is the ultimate loss of control. You cease to have any ability to do anything. All you have ever known is a body of flesh and bone; now unresponsive, unmoving, unliving. It is at that point that you have nothing at all to fall back on. Stripped bare, all pretension is gone.

What do we have to do or say at that moment except to trust Another completely with all we are?

And how can we practice for that most dire or most glorious moment, except to do the same now? If I cannot entrust myself to God, cede myself to God, relinquish control of myself to God today... how will I ever be prepared when no other option remains? If I cannot trust God in the pains of life today, how could I ever trust him with my very spirit at the moment when this body fails me?

If I cannot say now "Father, into your hands I commit my grief, my sorrow, my frustration, my hopes, my dreams, my passions and my fears," then neither am I ready to say "Father, into your hands I commit my spirit."