The experience of surrender is done in two times: past and future. How to live surrendering from now on? You must distinguish between effort and result. The time for effort is your time. Surrendering is not about crossing your arms; on the contrary, you must do everything possible to put all the enthusiasm, all the experience, seeking the collaboration of others as if everything depended on you. You should not ask where the will of God is. Do not wait for an angel to come down to show it to you: look for it yourself by applying a healthy discernment criterion.
But what happens? It happens that, although the effort depends on you, the result does not depend on you, but on a great complexity of causalities. For this reason, wisdom says that a great wall must be erected that separates the effort from the result. The time for effort is your time; the time of the result is the time of surrendering.
If the results do not depend on you, it is crazy for you live worried. What will it be? What will not be? It will be what the “Father” wants. You do, for your part, everything possible; leave the rest in His hands. Busy, yes; worried, no; Fight, yes, but with peace. Nothing is attained by worrying or anguishing.
By living worried about the results, many burn great energy uselessly. Prior from organizing a plan and while executing it, they live anguished by the fear of failure, seeing opposition everywhere, they suffer, they destroy energy; if the result has been negative, they allow themselves to be oppressed by their weight, they become insecure… Many ills come from living worried about the results.
Accept with peace everything that your effort cannot achieve. Abandon yourself in God to all the limitations that surround you. Peacefully accept the fact that you are not accepted by everyone. Accept with peace the fact of wanting to be humble and not being able to. Peacefully accept the fact that you are not as pure as you would like. Peacefully accept the fact that the results are smaller than the efforts and always leave with a taste of frustration.
Peacefully accept the fact that the road to sainthood is so slow, so long, so difficult. Peacefully accept the law of human insignificance, which means that, after your death, things will be the same as if nothing had happened. Peacefully accept the law of precariousness, transience, mediocrity, failure, old age, the decline of life, loneliness, the law of death. Peacefully accept the fact that your ideals are so high and the realities so small. Accept with peace the fact of wanting to please everyone and not being able to.
Father, in your hands I put myself. Do with me what you want. Thus, your inheritance will be peace and your home will also be peace. You must discover the secret sources of resistance and conflict not to open the wounds, but to heal them. To reconcile is to forgive. And to forgive is to surrender the resistance against someone and, above all, against oneself. That someone is, mainly, I repeat, yourself.
Taken from the book Dios Adentro chapter II “por el abandono a la Paz” subtitled “tiempo pasado, tiempo future” of Father Ignacio Laranaga.
