When you remove all of the trappings, as you work through all of the layers, when you clear out all of the obstacles, as you sift through all of the useless and unimportant, when you get right down to the bare essence of life, there is only so much that you can actually control. All human beings fall prey to the illusion that they can control every aspect of their lives and do so rigorously and ardently trying to wrap their arms around something too large to grasp, too varied to capture, too unwieldy to be wielded. As such, they tend to over control and stake their efforts in works that were doomed to fail from the onset. Life is too big, too complex, too elaborate to try and control it all. Instead control must remain focused on the elements that can be controlled with the rest relinquished to the power of another.

All human beings have free will and with that a solemn and sacred right to make their own choices, both good and bad. God will never overstep a person’s free will. He will not make your son or your daughter or your husband or your wife do something they do not want to do. Praying as such is always a waste of time. He can certainly work with people’s hearts to arrive at a better decision, but He will not and cannot violate freedom of will. The ability to choose and decide is the hallmark of humanity. Similarly, any attempts you might make in controlling other people is destined for failure. People always do what they want to do in one way or another. Behind every troubling situation you are seeking to control is a person deciding against what you have in mind to supposedly make their lives better. People resist being controlled at all costs even to their own detriment. You can certainly appear to exert control over a child when they are young, but in the end they will still act in accordance with their own will. All you can hope to do is teach them the good behind good choices and wait for them to learn and experience the rest. If you want to influence people’s behavior towards better choices, you must find ways to reward the good and overlook the bad. Focusing on what’s wrong with other people is not only egotistical, presuming you alone have all the answers, but also works to attract more of the undesirable behaviors you are seeking to extinguish. Seeking to control other people is actually over control and will never lead to the outcome you desire. Instead it will lead to bitterness and resentment in your own heart. Tell a man what he needs to do and he will most assuredly not do it! Would you?

Life is so varied and involves so much complexity that it is the height of insanity and ego to consider that you alone with your finite human brain can think through enough things to make life work out properly. For everything you think you know, there are a million things you do not know and cannot know! How much time do we spend trying to solve problems we did not initiate, never considering that something else did. Hopeless, we apply solutions other men devised while they still suffer from the same problems. We read the self-help books, the blogs, watch the Ted Talks, always hoping to gain some element of control over things we do not control. By the time you get on the airplane it is no longer upon you to will it into staying in the air, try as you might during a fit of turbulence. The diseases that afflict mankind seem to come whether a man makes healthy choices or not. Good people die and evil people prosper. There are downturns in the economy and unprecedented growth spurts. You do not control these things. Thinking you can control them by your strict adherence to certain practices fails to acknowledge that there is more to life than simply what you think and may have learned already. It is so much bigger than that. In the end, you drive yourself frantic seeking to control that which you do not control. Your hours of worry and consideration and night sweats over the possibility of acquiring some affliction, some disease, some tragedy, some catastrophe all serve simply to steal away your present moment in exchange for false assurance over some future moment, an assurance that will never arrive as long as you entertain the notion that it is something you control! You do not control all the variables of life, but God can as the need arises. He already knows the future. Your job in humility is to finally let it go and turn it over into the hands of another.

Man with all of his sophistication and smarts has been sold a bill of goods. He has been tricked and deceived into investing his efforts in things he cannot control. He spends his days consumed with thoughts of self-preservation. He considers and evaluates without seeing all the cards. He cannot discern that the circumstances have been preloaded to bring him to the wrong destination. In short, he wastes his time and his life on things that matter but things he does not control. To compensate he over controls much to the misery of both himself and with those in which he comes into contact. Life was never designed to be that difficult, no matter what the lousy world teaches to the contrary!

In contrast to the complexity and perplexity of error, the truth is always simple and very clear. The only thing you really have any control over is yourself. You do not control anything else. You control what decisions you make, what you believe, and what will you do with your life. The rest of it, all of the rest of it belongs to God who knows all and sees all. Your job, my job is to hand all the rest of it over to Him. Just hand it over to Him. It’s okay not to know what to do. Get some help. It’s okay not to know the answer. Get some help. It’s okay to feel worried about a situation. Get some help. Turn it over. Let it go. Relinquish your tight (fearful) grip! Trusting God means to give your worries and fears over to Him and then leaving them there. Stop trying to control stuff you do not control! You don’t need me to tell you this as you have already learned it in your own life experience. You already know your efforts to control do not work! Over-controlling does not work! Give God back His place and see if things don’t suddenly start working out for the better absent the thwarting impact of fear! Relax (at last) and let God be God while you do you…

Just some good thoughts…