One Act of the Will

I woke up the other day with my hand "asleep", that strange feeling that this appendage at the end of my arm belongs to me but it has no feeling, and the commands sent to it by my brain go unheeded.

As I waited for the blood to again return to my hand and return my hand to my use once more, I thought pensively that this feeling was bit like apathy.

When we fail to exercise our will and simply succumb to the pressures of life, we sometimes lose the ability to force our will to act. We then sit with a confused feeling in our minds like, "I know I should be acting, but no matter how much I know this, nothing happens." Our will becomes like that pathetic appendage at the end of our arm which refuses every instruction sent to it by its master.

Exercising one's will is not a matter of constantly battling that which is outside one's control, as if by simply willing it one can change one's circumstances. No, but willing one's self to surrender these things to God is a matter of operating the will. It is not simply giving up or succumbing to life's burdens, hurts, and disappointments.

Willful surrender is not a submission to things as they are. It is submission to the purposes of God and the hope that God will use our undesirable circumstances to accomplish His purpose in our life.

To arrest the apathy in our will we have to allow ourselves to feel the emotions that we have suppressed in the past in order to avoid the pain. We can feel the hurt, pain, and disappointment and accept the reality of those emotions while still surrendering the circumstances that drive them to God.

Allowing these hurts to fester under the false cover of apathy or denial only increases their septic power over every otherwise healthy part of our life. By allowing these emotions the freedom to flow again we allow ourselves to experience them and then heal from them. This healing process then strengthens our will to act in ways that agree with the hope that we hold in God's purpose for our life.

If I am powerless to do nothing but surrender to God's purpose, this one act of the will makes all the difference between giving up and holding onto hope for a better tomorrow.