“When you feel internally out of control, you try and control the externals.”
These were the words of a counselor friend spoken to me over ten years ago.
Those words were true of my false self back then and they were true of me as I sat on the floor on a Saturday morning in March of 2017 washing windows in our house. The night before on Friday our mom had to be rushed into the ICU at the hospital in update PA for an apparent stroke. We were in a panic not knowing what was going on. I needed to control something, so I started washing windows.
That Saturday we found out that mom was stable and so I decided to fly home a few days later after I had presented Loving Freely for Desire Street Ministries in Atlanta. When I had woken up that Saturday morning after not sleeping well, I was in a panic. I felt completely out of control and so I decided to do the next best thing, wash windows. As I began to wash the window, our sweet four your old Eden saw me doing something strange, approached her father and asked in her little voice, “Daddy, what are you doing?”
I responded, “Controlling something.”
Once again the words of a counselor rung true, “When you feel internally out of control, you try and control the externals.” Our responses externally to try and control something only reveal what’s happening inside of us. When we feel internally out of control, what external things we do try and control? Many times it can be circumstances, people, or possessions.
A few months later, mom would die. I spent the summer in PA being with dad and family and grieving myself. A month after I returned, our hot water heater stopped working, our refrigerator broke, and I realized we had to buy a new vehicle. I felt so utterly out of control of anything and it was driving me crazy.
In our Western Culture, we are constantly conditioned in falsely believing that we are in control of our lives. In an interview on the history of race in our country, Theologian Mark Charles said, “So much of western culture is based on the idea that we can control something and it’s all an allusion.” We know it’s a lie, but we like to live in the illusion of it.
If we want to press deeper into how deceitful our human heart is, we have to be honest about those places from our past where we felt out control, exposed, vulnerable, and then learned a coping mechanism to stay in control. At least that’s the truth for me. I’ve had moments from my past where I have been exposed, shamed, and so I developed patterns of trying to control the externals in my life so that wouldn’t happen again. The past is always playing out in the present and why it’s so important to deal with the past and allow Christ to heal us.
When I press into those painful places and face the ugly false self deep down in, I discover really what the root issue of my control, I’m afraid. I was afraid that mom was going to die that Saturday morning. I’m afraid that I will die and leave my wife and kids without a husband and father.
The allusion of control is not the gospel of trusting God. The opposite of control is trust and trust is what God calls us to in places where we feel out of control. But, we can’t trust when we’re afraid. When I’m afraid, the Holy Spirit is leading me to a place of recognizing how close God’s presence is in my life and it calms my fears, leading me to trust that God is near.
The opposite of fear is the presence of Christ. It’s what I sensed after my car accident in February of 2020 as I laid on a hospital bed at Grady in downtown Atlanta. I sensed the presence of Christ in a very real and substantive way. It’s what I sensed the whole time as we watched mom die.
It’s not that we ignore the places we feel out of control, it’s that we press deep into those places, be honest about them, embrace the truth of the scriptures and return back to the Island of Peace that God has created for us. He wants us to run to him to release control and not to the allusion of control in washing windows!