God Over Good By Luke NorsworthySample

Day Four: The Illusion of Control In the 146th lap of the 2014 Daytona 500, a thirteen-car accident occurred, ending the race for a handful of drivers, including one driver even non-NASCAR fans know, Danica Patrick. Up until then, Patrick appeared to be on her way to a respectable top-twenty finish, but the collision sent her car toward the wall. Naturally, she fought to keep her car away from the wall but with no success. A split second before the collision with the wall, she did the strangest thing: she released her hands from the steering wheel. When Patrick’s car crashed into the wall, the steering wheel violently twisted with such great torque that it would have snapped almost any athlete’s wrists if their hands had been wrapped around the wheel. Patrick saved her wrists by letting go of the wheel. Sometimes the only thing that can save us is letting go. To save her wrists, Patrick had to let go. To save our faith, some of us must do the same thing with our expectations. Like Jesus said, if we want to save our life, we must lose it. Salvation or control—if we want one, then we can’t have the other. When things are spiraling out of control, the most unnatural thing to do is to let go, but that act of relinquishing control might be the only thing that can save us. God did not sign a contract spelling out how God is supposed to act during adversity. The Bible is under no legal obligation to operate in my preferred way. God did not make a pact to meet our needs of clarity and to abolish ambiguity. But that doesn’t stop us from holding on to the expectations we’ve created or accumulated for God. To save our life, we must lose it. To save our faith, we must lose control. Or as Barbara Brown Taylor says, we don’t ever lose control; we only lose the illusion we ever had control. So maybe the better way to say this would be, “To save our faith, we must lose the illusion of our control.” This doesn’t mean we let go of God; it means we let go of our ownership of what God is. God, may I trust in who you really are, not who I need you to be.