Complete Surrender To God: A Photo Worth A Thousand Words

For my birthday last year, I asked for a photo shoot from my best friend who is an incredibly talented photographer. I had a specific image in my mind and I asked her if she thought she could capture that image. We both didn’t know if we would be able to pull it off but we decided to try.

After a few hours of scouting locations and testing shots, we did capture the one image I had wanted. It was one of the last photos we took, and it’s the photo you see on this blog.

A Picture of Surrender

This photo is so important to me because it visually represents the posture the Lord has asked me to embrace – complete and total surrender to Him.

I have heard the word “surrender” so many times in my Christian walk – surrendering my life to Jesus, surrendering my pain to Him, surrendering my sins to the cross. Surrender is an essential part to our faith journey and yet the idea of surrender has always eluded me. 

The word surrender implies giving up of something to someone else. Often used in a war context, it refers to laying down of arms to another side and of submitting fully to another authority. Other words that convey the same meaning of surrender are to “yield,” “concede” or “submit.” However used in the wrong context, surrender can convey sense of captivity – feeling bound and enslasved to another power. For those of us who have experienced brokenness in this world, perhaps that is the type of connotation surrender creates. However, the type of surrender that exists with God is different. 

What Does Surrender Look Like?

Jesus said in Matthew 16:24 “If any of you wants to be my follower, you must give up your own way, take up your cross, and follow me.” Surrender means a giving up of my own way in exchange for God’s way. We are called to follow Jesus, not our own human desires and will. Following Jesus looks different depending on what area of your life you are looking at, yet there is always a metaphoric path He asks us to walk that is His, not our own.

Surrender can take many forms:

• Saying no to an enticing opportunity
• Saying yes to something that feels uncomfortable
• Saying “I trust you God,” in the midst of a circumstance that is out of your control

Whatever it is, surrender is yielding to God’s higher ways and greater plan. 

The River of Life: My Metaphor for Surrender

When I think of the surrender the Lord is asking of me, its actually a fuller and deeper surrender of every area in my life. It means giving over to God every part of me and every part of my life. In contrast to the image above, I sometimes see myself thrashing in the water or trying to swim upstream when the river is pulling me downstream. It’s a representation of me trying to go against the force of God in my life instead of yielding to it. Surrender requires releasing my fears, worries and anxieties about future situations – letting go of my expectations of I want to happen in my life and accepting situations that I wished turned out differently.

Ezekiel 47 talks about a river that Ezekiel encounters, which is the same river in Revelations 21 – the river of life that flows through heaven and that Jesus says flows through us (John 7:38). In Ezekiel 47:5, Ezekiel steps into the river: first ankle deep, then knee deep, then waist deep. Eventually Ezekiel gets to a place in the river cannot be cross by wading and can only be crossed by letting go and surrendering completely to the flow of the river. Does that sound familiar? It is a posture of heart and mind that Jesus is inviting you and me into. It is the depth of complete surrender. That is the image I convey in the photo above and the concept I am currently embracing. 

Deeper Trust in God

I understand that it’s hard to be in this posture. It’s hard to trust God when your past tells you hurt may come again. It’s hard to surrender to a direction in your life when you fear you may not get to see your dreams realized. It’s hard to give over the reigns of your life to God when you don’t know what it’s going to look like. I understand because I’m right there with you. Yet I feel God asking us: will you take one more step into the river and trust Me? 

Through this journey, I have found this deeper place of surrender to a bigger God than I’ve ever known before. A God who is God over every good and bad thing in my life. A God who reigns over the blessings and sufferings. A God I no longer try to box in, dictating what He should do, but a God who I yield to, allowing Him to do whatever He wants, whenever He wants. This image is a reminder of just that.

Will you join me in the river, no longer waist deep but fully submerged, fully trusting however God leads?