Rebellion, resignation, or consent: The choice is yours.
Have you considered your heart’s attitude toward the challenges of the COVID-19 crisis? Your response is the difference between simply surviving this season and knowing Jesus more intimately on the other side.
Honesty in our emotions and attitudes is a critical first step in embracing God’s deeper work in our souls.
Complaints, restlessness, boredom, anger and anxiety are natural responses and part of the grief process as our exterior freedoms decrease. However, this forced quarantine also contains an invitation to more: To increase in interior freedom.
Interior freedom refers to that ability to live in a place of peace, faith, hope and love independent of – and even in spite of – outward circumstances. It requires a letting go of our own will and receiving what comes to us, trusting that God works all things for our good. Perhaps that is what the Apostle Paul was alluding to in Philippians 4 when he shared about the “secret” of being content in all circumstances.
In his book, Interior Freedom, author Jacque Philippe says this: “There is a paradoxical law of human life here: One cannot become truly free unless one accepts not always being free! This means consenting to our personal limitations, our weaknesses, our powerlessness; this or that situation that life imposes on us.”
Circumstances beyond our control – ones we do not want and would never choose – are precisely the ones that help us grow. We know this! We grow more in the bad times than the good; the hard places than the easy ones. And, yet we often fight against them.
Philippe says that when confronted with negative circumstances, we have three possible attitudes (which align somewhat with the stages of grief).
The first is rebellion; rejecting reality. This is often our first and most spontaneous reaction to difficulty or suffering.
The second is resignation; giving up! It is powerless and hopeless.
Rebellion and resignation leave no room for God to work. We may get through the difficulty but we remain unchanged or even hardened by the experience.
The third is consent; embracing a reality we initially saw as negative because we trust that God is bigger – that He is at work in us in ways we don’t see or understand. Picture Jesus who consented to great limitations in coming to earth (see Philippians 2 for a list) and to suffering in the Garden of Gethsemane. Philippe says consent leads to a completely different interior attitude and one that contains the virtues of faith, hope and love in embryo.
Consent…
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- enables you to be present to today as you let go of trying to control the future
- opens your eyes to see God’s gifts, provisions and opportunities
- instills hope that Someone bigger is in charge and at work
The question is: Are you willing to consent to what God has allowed into your life, trusting He is at work in ways you don’t see or know?
If so, consider including in your daily practices this popular prayer of consent by Thomas Keating.
The Welcoming Prayer
Welcome, welcome, welcome.
I welcome everything that comes to me today
because I know it’s for my healing.
I welcome all thoughts, feelings, emotions, persons,
situations, and conditions.
I let go of my desire for power and control.
I let go of my desire for affection, esteem,
approval and pleasure.
I let go of my desire for survival and security.
I let go of my desire to change any situation,
condition, person or myself.
I open to the love and presence of God and
God’s action within. Amen.
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Janice Tarleton is a full-time spiritual director, and program director for Sustainable Faith Affiliates, an online listing of experienced spiritual directors. She and her husband, Terry, founded Carefree Vineyard Church in Phoenix, Arizona and are now living in Iowa.
