In Control?
Whilst watching the Winter Olympics I have been struck by the number of sports that involve the athletes throwing themselves down steep slopes, as fast as they can possibly go, whilst trying to retain some sort of control. It is a little different to my distant memories of skiing - I could do the throwing myself down the hill bit… it was the control that was sadly lacking!
In the early 80’s I taught myself to ski whilst on a visit to the dry ski slope at the Yorkshire showground. After getting the hang of staying upright on the nursery slope, I thought I’d have a go at the big slope. The only slight problem was that I did not know how to turn, so I just went straight down very fast and then fell over when I wanted to stop. After about my third run I was, unsurprisingly, asked to leave the slope as my lack of control was a danger to everyone around me! Thankfully no-one was hurt.
We all like to be in control, or at least to think we are in control. Psychologists identify one of the key causes of stress in our lives is when we try to control events or the people around us, however the reality is that the only person we can control is ourselves and even that is hard sometimes.*
Thinking back to when our children were small it feels like we had some degree of control. However, at the weekend, I heard a friend describe his frustration at trying to get his daughters to get themselves dressed and ready for school. I was reminded that, even when our children are small, any control we think we have is very limited. As they grow we may have the ultimate sanction of turning off the Wi-Fi or confiscating a mobile phone, but we aren’t really in control. And when our children become adults we realise that we have no control, and perhaps all we ever really had was the chance to influence them, hopefully for the better.
I think that reflecting on this lack of control helps us see God in a different light. I’ve heard people sometimes say that ‘God is in control’, but I don’t think he is. The Bible shows us a God who shares his power with human beings; he gives us free will and the ability to create and to destroy. As a Christian, I believe that God’s power is at work in our lives, but that power is not held dictatorially.
God’s voluntary surrender of control is perhaps most clearly seen in the life and death of Jesus. He gives away his power, choosing to be born as a human being and choosing to surrender to the inevitability of his persecution and death at the hands of the authorities he was challenging. However, for Christians the story does not end there; at Easter we celebrate that Christ conquered death and rose from the grave showing us that God’s love and patience are stronger than death itself.
God does not control us, having given us free will, he can only guide and influence, as any parent with adult children – except he does that with infinitely more love and patience than we can ever imagine.
Rev Barry Jackson
*How we manage that urge to control is one of the things we’ll be exploring in a new course that we will be running in the summer term called...‘Living Well - managing stress and building resilience’
(more details in May on www.facebook.com/EdgehillChurches).