Yielding

I learned during birth that you have to surrender. The instinctual response to pain is to tense up, resist, pull away. But during labor, to clench and fight and resist is to work against the process by which the body amazingly opens up to allow a child to emerge at just the appointed time. I can remember so distinctly laboring with both of my girls on the long drive from Cheverly to Annapolis, riding wave after wave of contractions in the passenger seat while reminding myself to yield, to relax, to accept, not fight, the pain. Because of what it is working towards, birth makes pain purposeful, holy, transcendent. 

But this isn’t only true of childbirth. I’ve learned during all sorts of suffering, you have to yield. To open my hands to God in my pain and let him give to me the weighty and terrible gift of suffering is to allow him to transmute this evil into something beautiful. In surrender, the sufferer opens her heart wide, so she may be transformed. The Master artist is free to reshape and remold the clay into something refined, a gold cleansed of impurities. In resisting, the sufferer becomes brittle and can then only be crushed, rather than remade, under the artist’s hand. In surrender, our eyes are opened to glimpse the purposeful intention God has for this moment. In yielding, we say, “not my will, but thine.” Then, his will can become mine, and I enter the serene peace of union with the Suffering Servant. 

Resisting prolonged, inconclusive pain feels like being an exhausted, thrashing swimmer near drowning. A lot of energy is expended, but it doesn’t progress the swimmer towards life. What if they could yield to the water, only to find that with deep, calm breaths, and just a few tiny pulses of the hands or feet, the water doesn’t suck them down, but holds them up? I’ve often spent my energy in suffering thrashing around, consumed with the pain, unable to stop fighting it or thinking about it, trying to figure out what I could do to make it stop, or despairing that I couldn’t. Sometimes a shift occurs, though, and I remember to accept what God has allowed. I name the pain, and grieve it. But as I sit with it, I often find it seems smaller. I find I can set it aside and my mind can focus on other things, too. I feel like a swimmer gently floating on her back on calm and still waters. I’m not sinking or drowning, but resting. The peace doesn’t come from deliverance from suffering, but from finding myself joined to Christ is his sorrows.