I Surrender All

All to Jesus I surrender;
All to Him I freely give;
I will ever love and trust Him,
In His presence daily live.
I surrender all,
I surrender all;
All to Thee, my blessed Savior,
I surrender all.

As I sang along with Selah yesterday on the way to school, I found myself singing this song. A song that I have sang hundreds of time in church. A song I know every word to. Yesterday, the words struck a different chord with me. I stopped singing and really listened to the words. After the song was over, I was still thinking about its words. I’ve had something on my heart as of late and I’ve prayed and cried out to Jesus, but feel like my prayers are not being heard.

Or answered for that mattered.

I replayed the song and as I listened to the words of this song, I asked myself a very simple question: do I REALLY surrender all?

I mean, I DO pray.

And I DO try not to worry. (I’ve made huge strides here with Jesus’ help, but I’ve got a ways to go!)

And I DO want to surrender it all.

Sometimes I feel like Jesus needs my help in solving a problem or answering a prayer. You know, because He IS so busy and all.

Sound familiar? Or, am I standing alone in this line?

During my undergrad days (which I honestly adored), I became a world class worrier. If there were an Olympic medal for it, you can bet that I would bring home the gold every single time.

See, education has always been a huge part of my life. Growing up, my sister and I were expected to go to school, make good grades and just be all around good kids. My parents expected our best. Even my grandparents expected success from us. No one wanted to call Meemaw on Sunday and tell her that we didn't make all A's (admittedly, partly because the more A's we made, the more money she sent). It's not like they would have disowned me had I slipped up, but I've always hated disappointing them and I knew that excelling in school was a way to make them proud (a feeling I LOVE). For as long as I can remember, college has never been an option. It was an expectation. We would go to college, graduate and get a good job. While they didn't really care where we went to school, we didn't have much of a choice: we were going to college. And while there, we would show up at class, be respectful and make good grades.

I never really worried excessively about things in high school. Honestly, I hated it. It was way too "clique-ish" and so so childish. I wanted to get out as soon as possible. That's not to say I didn't try or take dual credit classes (I did). But it was a different worry. High school was free, and honestly, not rocket science. All I had to do was get out, hopefully in the top 10%, which did happen.

College was a whole new ball game. Not only was it ridiculously expensive, but it was just a whole new style of teaching/learning/testing, etc. My parents paid for every cent of my undergrad degree (books, tuition... literally everything) so we (my sister and I) didn't have to have tons of school debt after graduation. There was no way I was going to blow it. That added a whole new level of stress and worry in my life. I wanted so badly to make them proud, but often felt like I just couldn't do it.

I decided to major in Biology and ended up graduating with a double major in Zoology and Biology. My high school was a GREAT school (as is the entire district), but they didn't exactly prepare me for Texas Tech's biology department. Much less college level Human Anatomy. So by the time it came time for me to take ridiculously hard tests, my worry and stress skyrocketed. I was scared to death that I wouldn't be able to make it; "it was just too hard". Commence excessive worrying. I LOVED most of my Anatomy classes, but the tests were insanely hard. My sophomore year, I was absolutely overwhelmed. I had studied my tail off and right before this huge Anatomy test, I had a complete emotional breakdown. I called my poor mom just sobbing telling her about how sure I was that I was about to fail it. She took me driving around the loop and totally talked me down from the ledge.

Side note: We have this fun inside joke in my family; my sister and I have higher expectations for ourselves than even our family does. She's been known to freak out about grades and school once in awhile, and it definitely passed on to me. However, the times we freak out the most, we always end up doing very well. My parents always chuckle and remind us, "they can't eat you".

By the time I took Physics 2 (with the professor from Hell that shall remain unnamed so I am not forced to projectile vomit), I was a world class worrier. I actually ended up failing that class. I cried for days. Literally. I hated disappointing my parents like that and I felt like I had just single handedly thrown $700 bucks right out the window. Talk about guilt. My family was amazing about the whole thing. I had been telling them the whole semester that the man was a demon and literally no one was passing. They constantly said: "just do the best you can and that's good enough". And I can honestly say, I did the best I could. I retook Physics 2 the following summer and ended up with an A, proving how horrible the first teacher was.

I'm sure you are wondering by now how this little decoy relates to worry and surrendering, and here it is: I did the best I could. It did me absolutely no good to worry, cry, stress out. Did it help? Absolutely. But something tells me that I could have shed fewer tears if I had just surrendered all that worrying to Jesus. I should have learned to put in the hours studying, trying my best and doing all I could to not blow it. After I knew I had done that, I should have just surrendered the remaining worry to Christ. At that point, I've done all I can; why worry? That is such a hard lesson.

I spent so much time and energy worried myself silly over stupid things that I had absolutely zero control over. After you've done all you can, that's it. There's nothing else to do to better prepare.

I’ve really come a long, long way, but sometimes I feel like I’m standing back there on that road again, all alone worrying myself about some of those same things I worried about before Jesus got a hold of me and shook me real hard and reminded of the scripture in Matthew 6:27 that says, Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to his life?

Worry is not from the Lord.

It is, in fact, sin.

Worry creeps up and it creeps in and before you know it, your mind and your thoughts are no longer centered on Christ, the author and finisher of our faith (Hebrews 12:2). They are centered on what you can do to take care of the problem, fix the situation, or change the way people think. Instead, we need to look toward Christ.

Matthew 6:34 says, Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.

Man, that is so true.

Both of the verses in Matthew really speak to me. Especially at a time in my life when I shouldn’t concern myself or worry about things that I cannot change. I am 24 years old, and still, I worry. I worry about making it out of grad school alive. I worry about getting a great job soon after graduation.

I need to make some obvious changes. I need to pray a little longer and work a little harder to eliminate the worry from my life. In other words, I need to SURRENDER ALL OF IT.

ALL of the worry and ALL of the strife. ALL of the A's. ALL of the successes. ALL of the failures.

ALL OF IT.

All to thee, my blessed Savior!