Surrender Is Not Giving Up It Is Releasing Control

Some years don’t feel like they’re falling apart. They feel like you’re being asked to loosen your grip. When a friend named that experience “painful surrender,” it landed like a truth we’d been carrying in our bodies for months, and it gave us language for something that was hard to explain. If you’re used to solving problems, making plans, and staying two steps ahead, surrender can feel like failure, even when it’s actually courage.

We talk through why surrender isn’t waving a white flag. It’s releasing control over outcomes you were never meant to manage, and it’s admitting the uncomfortable line where your responsibility ends. We also get honest about the identity shift underneath it all: the version of you that got you here may not be the version that takes you where you’re going. Healing isn’t linear, and the strategies that once kept you safe can quietly turn into the very limits that keep you stuck.

Then we zoom out to faith, spiritual growth, and answered prayers. Blessings don’t always show up wrapped in ease or certainty. Sometimes they arrive with a cost: transformation, patience, obedience, and a deeper capacity to steward what you’ve been given. If you’ve ever felt grateful and grieving at the same time, this will meet you right there. Listen, share it with someone who needs the words, and if it resonates, subscribe and leave a review so more people can find it.

Transcript

Why Language Changes Everything

SPEAKER_00 0:00

So one of the reasons I started this solo podcast venture is because sometimes I think that we're living through something and experiencing things that we go through, I guess you could say, before we actually have language for it. Like we're carrying it, we're living it, we're reacting to it, and all of these things, but we can't quite name exactly what we're experiencing. And so there is something incredibly powerful about finally finding the words for what you've experiencing. Like I know, or maybe I haven't, but when I was deconstructing my faith, I didn't have the word deconstruction for what I was experiencing, and so it gave me language. But yesterday I was talking to one of my dearest friends. She's I mean, she's family to me at this point, she's my actually my daughter's godmother. And you know, actually, fun fact when we were sophomores in high school, we actually got in so much trouble that her parents literally sent her to the Philippines. Um, so we've lived some lives, but we've known each other through a lot of different versions of ourselves, and we were talking about this year the blessings, the opportunities, the growth, the laughter, the the triumphs, the the trials, all of the things that we've experienced, but things that we are still genuinely grateful for. But then she said something that really stopped me in my thought process, and she said that I think this year is a year of painful surrender, and I immediately felt that like in my whole chest, because for months now this word has continuously shown up in my life, and that word is just surrender, not the painful piece, but just surrender, not not striving, not hustling, not just just surrendering. And when she said painful surrender, it felt like someone had finally handed me the language for something that I had been carrying. And I believe that when people hear surrender, they assume like giving up like my white flag, you know, losing, you know, like I am succumbing. But that's not what surrender has felt like to me. Surrender

Naming Painful Surrender

SPEAKER_00 2:25

honestly may be one of the bravest things that people can do, and I think surrender is also evidence of faith. And surrender isn't really about losing, it's about releasing your grip and your control, for me at least. And sometimes the most painful thing that you could be experiencing isn't even the circumstance itself, it's realizing that there is no amount of strategizing, planning, controlling, overthinking, managing, anticipating or preparing or worrying that is going to change what is ultimately outside of your hands, that part is painful. This realization that my responsibility has ended somewhere before the outcome even begins. And if you're anything like me, that in and of itself is so uncomfortable because I am a solution-oriented person. I like solutions. Like when you give me a problem, I'm gonna figure it out. Like I have a mindset that everything is figured out. I like movement, I like progress, I like action, I like being able to point and be like, Okay, this is where this is gonna go,

Control Feels Like Safety

SPEAKER_00 3:35

this is how you do this. But this thing called surrender asks something so different of me, and in this season, it's asking me to stop trying to be God, and if I'm honest, that is a lot of where my discomfort has been, and not necessarily just in the surrendering itself, but in this confrontation with myself of realizing that I am trying to be God, and that's definitely not what I want to do, but like who am I? And I'm having to realize that that version of me that was trying to make sure that I could find the solution, strategize everything, overthink my way out of something, find a strategy, find a solution, like it can't come with me in this next evolution of me. It's been releasing this current version of me that I've had to surrender is something that I thought I had like healed through, that I had already done this like grieving of a prior version, but also realizing that I am going to do that over and over and over again. This one's just a little bit harder. I'm having to release the version of me that needs like certainty before moving, or the version of me that finds safety in being able to control, or the version of me that believes that if I just work hard enough, think hard enough, strategize enough that things can't hurt me. If I prepare enough, things can't hurt me. And the version of me that believes responsibility and control are the same thing, and they're for lack of a better term, y'all, they're fucking not. And I think one of the most painful parts of growth is realizing that the version of you that got you here isn't the version of you that's going to take you to that next step or to where you're going. There are parts of us that have protected us, and even when it comes to like healing, not being linear, and you think that you've overcome something, like, oh, I've healed this part of myself, and then it comes up again, and then you feel like a failure because you're like, Well, I thought I already dealt with this, but it you you probably have. There's parts of it that helped us and healed us, but I think the parts that you needed in those seasons may not have been the healing in its totality, but the parts that we've healed from have served us well, they've helped us survive until this point. They were strategies then, but now have become our own limitations.

Outgrowing Survival Strategies

SPEAKER_00 6:21

And surrender, I'm finding, is been this process of laying those things down and walking away from those, and not because they're bad, but because they're no longer necessary and they're no longer something that's going to help me manifest and walk into this new version of myself that God has for me. And when it comes to surrender, like I think that it also always can be perceived as these things that you've got to let go, but also blessings have that same requirement of things that need to let go. I think one of our biggest misconceptions about blessing is that we imagine that they'll only feel good and that they'll arrive wrapped in this beautiful package of certainty, wrapped in like ease and confidence and all the warm, fuzzy feelings. But what if blessings require things from us too? What if the blessing isn't just like opportunity or abundance? What if the blessing is transformation that's required in order to be able to sustain it or to steward it? What if the blessing is teaching you, you know, trust and patience?

When Blessings Ask Something Back

SPEAKER_00 7:40

You know, like everyone talks about like don't pray for patience because it's not necessarily the patience that you get, it's the things that require you to develop that muscle of patience. But what if the blessing is teaching you obedience? Because the truth is that every new level of responsibility asks you for something. Marriage asks you for something, motherhood asks you for something, leadership asks you for something, healing is asking you for something, faith asks for something, and I'm finding myself in the season where I am deeply grateful for what God is doing in my life while I'm simultaneously grieving what He's asking me to release. And that is a really strange place to stand because both of these things can be true. We can be grateful and grieving, I can be excited and afraid, you can be hopeful and exhausted, you can be trusting and struggling at the exact same time. Faith can often look like certainty, and I think it is certainty, but for me, faith I'm binding is that faith is in the things I know, and so for me, like faith is in I know that God is faithful, but then it's also faith in the things that I don't know because I don't necessarily know all the steps and all the details, but I have to sit back on the fact that I know that God is faithful. So I may not know exactly how things

Grateful And Grieving Together

SPEAKER_00 9:20

are going to work out, but I ultimately know that they will work for my good. And the older I get, the more I start to wonder if faith is actually just surrender, not certainty. Trust that he is faithful. Not answers, but trust that he's going to guide you to them or provide them. And not even the outcome, but just trust. I don't know if you need to hear and say it out loud for yourself that like I don't know how this is going to unfold. I don't know how this is going to resolve, I don't know how this story ends, but I trust in the one that does. And even as I say this, like, God, like, I need to hear that. Saying that self- saying that to myself out loud is giving me, I don't know, a little bit of an unlock even in this moment. But I also don't want to acknowledge that me saying that I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, but I do know is one thing, but living it and walking that out is another.

Faith As Surrender Not Certainty

SPEAKER_00 10:36

And I think even in that dichotomy, that that's exactly where surrender does become painful. And it's not because God isn't in it, but it's because we're being invited or called up into the ability to loosen our grip. I don't know. Maybe that's what I wanted to share today. I don't know where I started and where I'm going, but you know, maybe you're listening to this and you found yourself feeling something you couldn't quite name to, and maybe you're carrying that grief and not really knowing that it's grief because it doesn't look like grief. And maybe you're standing in the middle of an answered prayer while simultaneously mourning what it costs to get you there. Maybe you're learning that growth isn't always about acquiring more or getting bigger. Sometimes it's about releasing more, perhaps. I don't know. And if that's where you were, like I want you to know that you're not alone. Maybe this season isn't falling apart, maybe it's surrender, maybe it's painful surrender, and maybe there's something sacred and beautiful about finally having the language for that. I don't know.

The Cost Of Growth

SPEAKER_00 12:00

I do know. That's just exactly what I mean. It maybe that's it. Y'all, if this resonated with you, send it to someone. Not because it has answers, but because sometimes the greatest gift we can give another person is language. Language for what they're feeling, language for what they're caring, the ability to feel seen and witnessed. And if this episode gave you words to something you've experienced, maybe it'll do the same for someone else.