Our Obsession with Control

I have been on vacation for the last ten days. My hope and goal was to completely detach and relax. No email, no phone calls, and no writing—not even for this blog. I told my wife, “My life and job require me to make constant decisions. You are making the decisions on this trip”. It took me three days to really settle down. It was hard. It was hard not to constantly check emails or call the office to “check in” or sneak away to work on some project “for a little while”. I learned a hard truth about myself.   Sometimes I am a control freak. I like things my way because my way is always the right way…right? Wrong. I have been guilty of manipulating situations or fudging on facts so that I get what I want. I call myself a Christian, a follower of Christ. Christ wasn’t described as a control freak. Jesus is described as “the lamb of God”. Could there be anything more vulnerable and submissive than a lamb?

Yet so many of us are addicted to control. We use all kinds of tools to control our environment. Some people use subtle manipulation so that things turn out their way. Others use anger or violence to control the people around them. Still, others use fear and some even use sex to get what they want.

The life of faith is more about letting go than holding on. To be fair, I believe that one of the vocations of every human being is to live life well, to work hard and to be productive. At the same time, we must admit that some things are simply out of our control. This becomes an issue of trust. Do I trust the God that I say I believe in? Trust is learning to be “ok” with not knowing “why?” Early in our marriage, my wife and I lost two children to miscarriage. We asked a lot of “why” questions and God answered with nothing but silence. We needed to go through a period of mourning and grief.  The author Richard Rhor writes in his book Simplicity- “Historic cultures saw grief as time of incubation, transformation, and necessary hibernation. Yet this sacred space is the very space we avoid. When we avoid darkness, we avoid tension, spiritual creativity, and finally transformation. We avoid God, who works in darkness – where we are not in control”. As the years went on, we have become OK not knowing why. It was hard to let go, but in the end we chose to embrace the mystery of faith. Even when things don’t go my way, even when the outcome is less than ideal, I hand control to one who created time and space/ I walk with the one who is present in the past, present and future.