I Stopped Leaning So Hard

On surrender, grounded faith, and the God who was never limited to my circumstances

There was a season I held onto God the way you hold the side of a pool when you are not sure you can float. Both hands. Everything you had. Not from devotion. From desperation.

And that is not a criticism of that season. It was the most honest faith I had ever practiced. Because it was unperformed. There was no version of me in those moments that was trying to look like someone who believed. I just needed something that would not move. And He was it.

But I have been thinking lately about how that posture of faith served me then and what it has slowly become now. About the difference between leaning on God because you are afraid of what happens if you stand on your own and trusting God because you have seen enough of His faithfulness to release the outcome without gripping it. Those two things feel similar from the outside. They are not the same thing on the inside.

There is a difference between dependent faith and grounded faith. And I do not say that to diminish the dependent version because dependent faith is real and it is necessary and there is nothing wrong with it. It is faith in its most honest and unadorned form. It is the person saying I cannot do this without you and meaning every word of it.

But there is another kind of faith on the other side of that season. The kind that does not grip. The kind that has done enough interior work and experienced enough of God’s faithfulness that it no longer needs to white-knuckle the relationship to feel secure in it. The kind that can release control not because it stopped believing but because it finally believes deeply enough to trust the outcome without managing it.

That is surrender. Not passivity. Not distance. Not stepping away. Surrender is the most active form of faith there is because it requires you to continuously choose to release what the hands want to hold.

Dependent faith and grounded faith both believe. But one is holding on for survival. And the other has finally learned how to let go.

Let me describe what the early leaning actually felt like, because I think the texture of it matters and I do not want to skim past it in a way that flattens what it was.

It felt like need in its purest form. Not the gentle, trusting need of someone who believes they are held. The raw, urgent, sometimes frantic need of someone who is not entirely sure the ground beneath them is stable and is reaching upward because reaching is the only option available. My prayers in that season were not composed. They were not eloquent. They were honest in the way that only desperate honesty is honest. They were conversations held in the dark, in the quiet after everyone else had gone to sleep, in the middle of moments that felt too heavy to carry alone.

I did not know how to separate my circumstances from my faith in that season. If things were hard, I felt far from God. If things shifted and something good came through, I felt close again. My sense of His presence was almost entirely contingent on the conditions of my external life, which meant that my faith was being held hostage by circumstances I could not control. I did not understand that at the time. I just knew that some days felt like He was near and some days felt like I was praying into a silence that did not know my name.

What I was experiencing was not distance from God. I understand that now. What I was experiencing was the consequence of having built my entire relationship with Him on the scaffolding of my circumstances. When the circumstances were hard, the scaffolding shook. When the circumstances shifted, the scaffolding steadied. But the scaffolding was never the structure. And at some point, through the slow and nonlinear process of healing and growing and being honest about what I actually believed versus what I had been taught to say I believed, the scaffolding started to come down.

And what I found underneath it was something more solid than I expected.

The transition did not happen in a single moment. There was no night where I went to sleep leaning hard and woke up grounded. There was a long, incremental, sometimes invisible process of the internal architecture quietly changing while the external life continued to make its ordinary demands.

Part of what changed was my understanding of control. I had been, for most of my life, someone who managed. Who anticipated. Who prepared for every possible outcome as a way of reducing the threat of being blindsided by one. Control was not something I sought consciously as a value. It was something my nervous system had learned as a survival strategy in environments where things happened without warning and without adequate care for what the happening did to me. And I had carried that strategy into my faith without realizing it. I was trying to manage God the same way I managed everything else. Bringing Him my plans and asking Him to bless them. Bringing Him my fears and asking Him to remove them. Bringing Him my timeline and asking Him to honor it.

Healing, over time, began to loosen that. As my nervous system slowly learned that safety did not require constant vigilance, something in my relationship with God began to shift as well. I started to become genuinely capable of releasing things I would previously have white-knuckled. Not because I had decided to trust more. But because my body had accumulated enough evidence that releasing was survivable.

You cannot think your way into surrender. It comes through the body. Through accumulated evidence. Through enough seasons of release to finally believe, at the cellular level, that what you let go of does not destroy you.

And then there was the understanding about my reality and God’s role in it that took the longest to arrive at.

For most of my faith life I had collapsed those two things together in a way that was quietly doing damage to both. God was responsible for the conditions of my life. Which meant that when the conditions were hard, something was either wrong with my faith or wrong with His faithfulness. Which meant that suffering felt like accusation. That difficulty felt like abandonment.

I do not believe that anymore. And the unbelieving of it has been one of the most liberating theological shifts of my life.

My reality is my reality. The job and the bills and the complicated love and the grief and the career uncertainty and the slow, nonlinear process of building something meaningful while the practical demands of life make their daily claims. All of it is real. All of it is mine to navigate. None of it is a measure of God’s presence or absence in my life. It is simply the terrain. And God moves through all of that terrain without being defined or limited by it. He is not present when things are good and absent when things are hard. His presence is not contingent on my reality looking a certain way.

That separation, once it became real to me rather than just theologically correct, changed everything about how I move through difficulty. I stopped asking God why the terrain is hard and started asking Him what He is growing in me as I walk through it. I stopped treating prayer as the mechanism by which I influence outcomes and started treating it as the practice by which I stay connected to something larger than the outcomes.

He is not the God of favorable conditions. He is the God of the unfavorable ones too. And the faith that understands that does not shake the same way when the conditions get hard.

What I feel now, in this season, is something I want to describe carefully because I think it is easy to misread from the outside.

I do not lean on God the way I used to. And that is not because I have grown distant. It is because I have grown. The leaning in the early season was survival. The leaning now is different in quality. It is less desperate. Less urgent. Less contingent on feeling His presence in the immediate emotional sense. It is quieter. More settled. The way you trust something you have tested enough times to no longer need to test again.

I have let go of control in areas of my life that I held onto for a very long time. The career that has not resolved into clarity yet. The love that is still an open question. The future that I can see the direction of but cannot yet see the full shape of. I have released my grip on the outcomes of all of those things in a way that would not have been possible for me even two years ago. Not because I stopped caring. Because I finally trust, at a level that lives below thought, that the outcome is not mine to manage.

That is surrender. Not passivity. Not the absence of effort or intention. But the releasing of the outcome after the effort has been made. The willingness to do everything within my capacity and then open my hands around what I cannot control and trust that whatever fills them will be what I actually need.

It is the most active thing I have ever done spiritually. Because every day the hands want to close again. Every day the old patterns assert themselves. And every day the practice is the same. Noticing the reaching. Choosing the releasing. Trusting the foundation that has not moved even when everything around it has.

Surrender is not a one-time decision. It is a daily practice of opening the hands that want to close. Of choosing trust over the management of outcomes that were never fully mine to manage.

I have stopped leaning so hard. Not because I need Him less. But because I finally trust Him more. And those two things, I have discovered, are not the same. Needing is about survival. Trusting is about relationship. And what I am in, on the other side of everything the early season required of me, is finally beginning to feel like the second thing.

He has been faithful. In the desperate season and in this quieter one. In the leaning and in the releasing. In the moments I felt His presence like something tangible and in the moments I prayed into what felt like silence and chose to believe it was not silence but simply stillness.

The faithfulness was never contingent on the conditions. It was always moving underneath them, through them, despite them. I just had to grow enough to see it that way.

And that is what surrendering control eventually gives you. Not the life you managed. Not the outcomes you engineered. But the eyes to finally see what was always there.

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This isn’t a space for perfect healing.
It’s a space for honest becoming.

For the days you’re growing and grieving at the same time.
For the parts of you you’re still learning how to hold.

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