Michelle DeRusha

Every Day Faith. Faith Every Day.

surrender

Drop Your Nets

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Last weekend I read the story in Matthew 4 of Jesus’ call to Peter, Andrew, James and John to follow him and become his disciples. “Come,” Jesus said to the fishermen. “Follow me, and I will make you fish for people.”

Matthew tells us that all four men immediately dropped their nets, left their boats and followed Jesus, and I wondered, in that moment, what Jesus might be asking me to leave behind in order to follow him. My initial response was, “Nothing.” After all, I reasoned, last year was the year of leaving things behind. I quit book publishing, I quit writing my monthly column for the local newspaper, I quit speaking. I let so much go; surely there couldn’t be more to release, right?

In addition to the Year of Quitting Everything, 2019 was also a season of deep soul-searching. I read several spiritual and secular “self-help” books, re-entered counseling and filled journal after journal with questions and reflections. I was on a quest, a pilgrimage of sorts, to uncover my true, God-created self, and I was determined to leave no stone unturned. It was an exhilarating, gratifying, transformational season.

Research is my sweet spot, my comfortable place. Nothing makes me happier than gathering facts, evidence, knowledge and answers – especially, it turns out, when my research topic is my own self. I dove into my year of self-discovery with gusto. But here’s what I am realizing about my desire for knowledge, information, clarity and answers: it is, ironically, yet one more way I keep myself at arm’s length from my own self, from others and from God.

There is nothing inherently damaging about [most] self-help books (spiritual or secular). There’s nothing wrong with looking to the guru of the day for guidance and insights. Many offer a tremendous depth of wisdom and compassion, and I learned a lot from what I read this past year. The problem arises, however, when this quest for knowledge and insight becomes both another distraction – a way to avoid – and a means to control.

As long as I assume I can find the answer – the way – “out there,” I don’t have to sit with what’s right here in the deepest part of myself.

When I heard Jesus tell me to drop my nets, I realized he was asking me to drop what had become a safety net. “Come, follow me,” he said. He was asking me to leave my desire for clarity and direction behind in order to walk alongside him in trust, regardless of whether or not I know where we are going.

Jesus didn’t give the disciples any direction when he called them. He didn’t point out which way they were headed; he didn’t offer any clear insights or answers or even hint about where they were going. He said nothing other than, “Come, follow me,” along with the cryptic, “and I will make you fish for people.” Jesus’ presence was answer enough, and he asked his disciples to trust him with that single piece of evidence.

Nets can offer us safety, but safety is not always the better way. What looks like safety can end up entangling us. What looks like security can keep us from the true freedom into which God invites us.

It is good and right to be attentive to God’s movement in our lives, but it is also good and right to trust that he will make the way known without our grasping or pushing, without our seeking or striving – without, in fact, a lot of effort on our part at all. This is not complacency or apathy, but rather, a receiving, a yielding – a surrendering in confident trust that God is putting everything right with us and for us.

As I am learning, there’s always more to leave behind; there’s always something else to drop. Each time we release, we come closer alongside God.

What the Sublime Can Teach Us about God and Ourselves

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Hi, friends! Just back from ten days in Italy – Italy! – and I have SO much to tell you. But…it’s going to come slowly, that much I know already. So in the meantime, here’s a piece I wrote at the end of June for the Lincoln Journal Star about the importance of experiencing God in nature. Thanks for being patient with me as I recover from jag leg and get my head on straight. xo – Michelle

 

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A few weeks ago I stood at the edge of a deep chasm. Far below me a river frothed in a violent maelstrom, thundering over a rocky precipice and plunging into a deep pit carved ten thousand years ago. A fine mist rose in a rainbow of pastels, coating my face in a cool sheen as I peered into the abyss.

I’ve been coming to this sublime spot on the north shore of Lake Superior nearly every summer for the last twenty years, and this particular river never fails to make my heart beat fast.

The gorge is beautiful and magnificent, but it’s also a place to be respected and feared. People have died in this river, swept away by the powerful water in the blink of an eye. In fact, two days after I was there this June, a young man drowned while swimming near the mouth of the river, pinned under the rapids by the tumultuous current.

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Nowadays we tend to use the word “sublime” as a synonym for “amazing” or “awesome.” We declare a slice of flourless chocolate cake in a fancy restaurant or an oil painting on a gallery wall “sublime,” but in doing so, we misuse the word as it was originally intended.

Back in the late eighteenth century, “sublime” meant something vastly different. Most often used to describe an aspect of the natural world, the sublime encompassed an element of terror melded with beauty, a sense of bigness and mystery that prompted awe tinged with dread and fear.

I think it’s important to experience the sublime in its original sense from time to time. This might entail standing next to a roaring river like I did recently, or at the edge of a vast prairie as a thunderstorm rolls in, or at the base of a looming, snow-capped mountain, or any place in the natural world that reminds us of our smallness.

Every once in a while, we need to stand in the presence of that furious, awesome power and remember our place in the world, which isn’t nearly as important as we like to think it is.

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Most of us walk through our days assuming we are in control. We’ve orchestrated our everyday lives so that, for the most part, they are predictable and manageable. We like to steer our own ship, and we’ve defined God in a way that makes sense and fits neatly into our comfortable, clockwork daily existence.

The hard truth, though, is that this control we work so hard to maintain is an illusion. Perched on the edge of that roiling river, confronted with the fact that my life could be extinguished with one slip of my hiking boot on the crumbly, uneven trail, I felt small, powerless, and more than a little afraid. It was an uncomfortable feeling, but an important and even a necessary one.

The sublime not only forces us to acknowledge our own impermanence head on, it also insists we reconsider how we understand and define God.

The same God who created the serene brook burbling through the sunlit glade also created the water that roils through the gorge that makes my heart race with fear. If we are really honest, this might make us uneasy, because it means we don’t understand God and can’t control him, in spite of our best efforts. God’s ways are not our ways, and to experience the sublime in person is a powerful and necessary reminder of that.

 

What My Nudie Kid Taught Me about Surrender and Trust

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I wrote my memoir Spiritual Misfit over a period of two years when my kids were quite young. It was a time in which my spiritual life and my faith grew exponentially, and much of what I learned God taught me through my children and through the hard lessons of parenting. Today I’m sharing one of the more humorous stories from the book (although it wasn’t all that funny in real-time), about how an incident with my son Noah (who was about five at the time) taught me about surrender and trust. This excerpt is from Chapter 10: Surrendering the Fear:

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It was the kind of day in early spring that made you hold your breath in anticipation, a day just warm enough to entice with the barely plausible thought of ice cream. The kids and I sat outside Dairy Queen under the crab apple tree, contentedly licking our soft-serve cones as fragile blossoms dropped like snowflakes onto the asphalt. The air was rich with the scent of recent rain and new green, the concrete bench still so cool it seeped a wintry chill through the seat of my jeans.

Noah had finished his cone in record time and was leaping from one bench to another, while Rowan dripped rivulets of chocolate down his arm and into the crease of his elbow. I had just turned toward him with a paper napkin when Rowan burst out laughing and pointed, rainbow sprinkles falling like confetti from his fingers.

When I looked up, I saw Noah standing atop a bench with his jeans and Bob the Builder briefs wrenched down to his knees. He was waggling his penis in the direction of a mini-van parked at the drive-through, one arm arched above his head like a rodeo porn star. The husband in the driver’s seat was clueless, busy balancing a carton of Blizzards, but his wife was aghast, slack-jawed as she stared at my son.

“Noah! What are you doing?” I screeched. “Pull up your pants right now before a cop drives by and arrests you for indecent exposure!” [I admit, not my very best parental response ever] He froze for a split-second, eyes wide, before yanking his pants up.

We didn’t rehash the incident on the way home. I figured my dramatic reaction had been sufficient to convince Noah that public penis-waggling was inappropriate. A month later, though, as I hunched over the keyboard in our basement office one night, Noah appeared, standing behind me in his dinosaur pjs.

“Am I going to jail?” he blurted, his eyes filling with tears. “Am I going to jail because of Dairy Queen?”

“What in the world are you talking about?” I asked, faintly irritated that it was after nine o’clock and he was still awake and conversing with me. Turned out, of course, he was referring to, as he put it, “When I was nudie at Dairy Queen.” He had mulled over the incident and my rash words each night for a full 28 days before finally gathering the courage to voice his fears.

I explained to Noah that I had overstated the punishment — overreaction, Brad once wryly noted, is my modus operandi. I assured him that the police would not arrest a five-year-old for pulling his pants down at Dairy Queen, and then I apologized, more than once, and hugged him tight.

After he had gone back to bed, though, I couldn’t stop thinking about the incident. I felt horrible and irresponsible for terrifying him. What kind of mother was I, anyway? Wasn’t I supposed to protect my child from the evils of the world, to nurture his fragile psyche rather than single-handedly destroy it? Shivering in the chilly basement that night, I felt overwhelmed, inadequate and vastly unqualified in my role as a parent.

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Noah and Magnolia

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In that moment I realized that Noah’s fragility mirrored my own. His fear and powerlessness illustrated to me how incredibly ill-equipped we are to face on our own whatever the big, mean, scary world tosses our way. And just as Noah turned to me in a moment of desperate hopelessness and fear, I knew that I could and would have to turn to God in the same way. Noah had tried to conquer his fear himself, lying in bed each night sifting through his terror. But in the end he couldn’t do it; he had to unburden himself in the face of what to him was an insurmountable problem. Likewise, in a strange twist of events that night in the basement, I learned that I needed to do the same. When the world threatened to crush me with hopelessness and fear, I needed to turn to God and put my trust in him.

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Sitting in the dark, cold basement that night, I turned the whole ugly mess — all my fears, all my insecurities in parenting — over to God. I realized then that God loves me in spite of my blurting and blundering, in spite of my overreactions and foot-in-the-mouth moments. I realized that God forgives even my worse parenting decisions, and, if I let him, can ease even my worst fears.

Yet I also knew, even in the midst of that unburdening, that surrender and trust wouldn’t ever be easy for me. My very nature battles it. I understood that I would have to repeat this process of surrender and trust again and again, possibly throughout my entire lifetime.

But I also understood that I had a choice. The choice to trust was all mine.

Hear It on Sunday, Use It on Monday: The House and the Shack

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Last week I cleaned and organized the basement. It hit 105 degrees here in Nebraska, so I figured burrowing into the cool cellar for a few hours wasn’t a bad idea.

I boxed up old toys and books, sucked in cobwebs with the vacuum attachment, rolled up and threw out the dilapidated rug and rearranged some of the furniture. Then I concluded that the bookshelf needed to be shifted over a couple of feet, so that it would be centered on the wall. Since I didn’t want to remove the dozens of books, stack them in piles on the floor, move the shelf and then rearrange all the books again, I decided I’d move the shelf with the books still on it.

I pushed. I pulled. I grunted and groaned and heaved and wrenched my back. The shelf creaked and cracked and threatened to topple. A few paperbacks pitched onto the floor. But the shelf didn’t budge. In the end, after 15 minutes of exhausting exertion and a pulled neck muscle, the shelf was exactly one inch from its original spot. Not  two feet. One inch.

I gave up. I left the bookshelf where it was. All my pushing and pulling and sweating and heaving resulted in nothing.

And this, my friends, is the perfect metaphor for my publishing journey.

For the last three years I’ve dedicated hundreds of hours to building a platform. I’ve written more than 700 blog posts, an entire book, a quarter of another and two book proposals. I’ve tweeted, Facebooked, commented, Klouted, emailed, guest-posted and Google Plussed. I’ve pushed and pulled and forced this process along with all my might.

And you know what? I’ve moved it the equivalent of one inch.

Thanks to yesterday’s reading, I now know exactly what I’ve done wrong.

“If God doesn’t build the house, the builders only build shacks. If God doesn’t guard the city, the night watchman might as well nap.”(Psalm 127:1, The Message)

Did you catch that? If God doesn’t build the house, the builders only build shacks.

The hard truth is, I’ve tried to build the house all on my own, without God.

Okay, okay, God has sort-of been involved. After all, I write about God every day. I pray. I talk to God. I believe that he inspires my words, and I know that my faith has grown stronger and deeper because of my writing. But still. I have allowed him only a minor role in the construction of this house.

God has been a crewman on this project, not the boss.

As Pastor Michael said in his sermon yesterday, “When it’s apart from God, work becomes labor.”

This publishing journey has been labor — labor speckled with occasional moments of joy, but mostly labor, with pain, writhing and a fair bit of screaming and cursing. 

I know, I know, you’ve heard all this before from me, haven’t you? After all, back on December 31 I resolved to make “surrender” my word for the year. But I haven’t surrendered, not entirely. Or maybe I have…on some days…but then I revert back to my pushing-pulling-grunting-heaving habits all over again.

Good grief I’m a slow learner.

So today, once again (sigh), I surrender. I hand over the plans and the blueprints to God. I allow him his rightful and only role as the foreman, the big boss. And I ask him to forgive me for trying to run the show.

I’m done building the shack. God holds the plans for this house, and he’ll decide whether it will be a mansion or a hut…or something altogether different. 

What about you? Have you ever caught yourself trying to build the house all by yourself?

With Jennifer and the Soli Sisters:

 
And a new Monday link-up community over at Duane’s place (Scribing the Journey) – have you met Duane? He’s cool…and so is Unwrapping His Promises:


 

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What I’ve Learned from Not Publishing

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I once told a friend that after every interview, I always assume I’ll get the job.  It’s true. I leave thinking, “All righty…I wonder when they’ll want me to start?”

Now, before you conclude that I’m the most arrogant person on Earth, let me explain. I have indeed landed every job I’ve ever applied for, but not because I am the greatest, most gifted professional ever to step foot into the workforce. Instead, my success has always been the result of one simple factor: preparedness (combined with a fair amount of luck, too).  

I am the classic Type A over-achiever. My barely average SAT scores, below-average GRE scores and other standardized tests always proved what I already knew: I got good grades in school not because I’m naturally smart, but because I studied. A lot.
…Will you join me over at the Lincoln Journal Star for a story about silver linings?

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