Surrender.

Surrender. What does it mean to truly surrender? Surrender yourself to fate, to life, to the odds, to your destiny, to God Himself.

That is the word that keeps coming up in my head over and over in the last 24 hours. Surrender. Its time to just let it all go. Let go of the fear and the worry. Let go of the anticipation and the angst. Just let it all go and let my destiny play out before me. The outcome of the test tomorrow has already been determined. God knows the answer, He knows how it will end up and there is already a plan in place to deal with that outcome. If the cancer is gone, yippee, skippy, happity doo dah! If it’s not quite gone, well then, I go to Plan B. Life is all about how you handle Plan B anyway, since how rarely does Plan A ever work out? So my Plan A is, of course, clear. However, I am also a realist and know that the odds of getting an all clear with advanced stage cancer is minimal, so I have surrendered myself to whatever the test will say. If I have to go with Plan B, well then that’s what I will do.

What is Plan B? How the heck do I keep on keeping on? Well, I just do. I do one more round for good measure and then I take a little break to get healthy and then I jump back on the merry-go-round and do it again, this time with even more enthusiasm and less cancer to beat. I know it’s less. I know it hasn’t spread. I don’t know why I know that, I just know. I am not positive it is completely gone, but I know it has been minimized and is on its way out.

So I surrender. I let go and let God control my future and let divine providence play out before me. I never had control anyway. The control that I think that I had is such an illusion. I can control my attitude and how I behave in any given situation, but I cannot control the situation and how the future is going to unfold. I can pray and ask and beg, but God has a plan, and He knows what that plan is going to be. That is a bitter pill for someone who likes to be in control of her life like I do. I want to have a plan and have it laid out before me and know what the next step will be, but this experience has shown me that is not possible. I simply have to let go and roll, let the chips fall where they may, and have a positive attitude when its time to pick up the pieces when they land in a scattered mess.

This does not mean that I give up praying. I think God hears our prayers and considers them. Maybe right now He is thinking….and you are praying for me…and that prayer will have Him set me free of the cancer. Well, then, intercede on my behalf, my faithful prayer warriors, ask God to set me free from cancer. I’m ready.

As difficult as it is to surrender my life, how does it feel to completely surrender others to their own destiny and turn their lives over to God? Especially when that person is your child that you have raised and love so deeply? Surrender means “to give up or give back something that was granted.” God granted this child’s life to me to raise. I have done my job. I have raised him and now its time for me to surrender him back to God. The jury is still out on whether I did a good job raising him, but I did the best I could with the tools I had and the rest is up to him. His destiny, his future, is not in my hands and I have no control over the plan for his life. I have stepped back and surrendered him to God, to the legal system which will control his future, to his own devices, attitudes and decisions which will guide his path. I cannot control anything that is going to happen to him anymore. I don’t think I ever could. The reality of the situation is that it is completely, utterly, absolutely out of my hands. Surrender is truly all I can do.

There is freedom in surrender. There is absolution. Like a weight is lifted and the burdens are set free. I can live with whatever comes my way; I am liberated from the chains of control, the weight of worry. The yoke of fear no longer tight around my neck. I am free.