Desire and Surrender

When I think about how God has moved in my life, especially how he has led me forward at different junctures, I see this impenetrable knot, where His inspiration of my desires intertwines with His call to surrender my will absolutely to His. This combination feels almost impossibly paradoxical in that it requires an appreciation for the majesty of mystery and a tolerance for the anxiety of uncertainty, two states of mind indicative of a receptive disposition toward experience, and yet that very disposition feels most impossible when we have to make decisions about things that are important to us. It's easy to relax and tolerate uncertainty in trivial matters; in German, the idiomatic expression for "it doesn't matter" translates literally to "it's all equal to me." But if desire is anything, it is the emergent salience of our implicit preferences, the awareness of the inequality of outcomes to ourselves. Sometimes, in this respect, becoming aware of desire feels almost cruel, for we believe that we have been moving along just fine, adequately surrendered, and now we are presented with the possibility of the sin of disobedience in following desire's miscue, or the sting of disappointment in choosing something that feels immediately less desirable. We might even wish that we had no desire and no free will; that, we think, would make surrender and obedience so much easier. And yet our experience of this conundrum foregrounds those motives that are always driving us, even beyond the reach of our consciousness, and opens them up in us at a moment when they are most alive and softest to his touch. And I think that this is God's gift to us when we do, nonetheless, surrender: not the annihilation of desire, but its perfection.