Sumo Wrestlers
Several dark mornings a week, I woke up with a rather large sumo wrestler standing over me, pulling my stomach into a tight knot of anxiety at the thought of widowhood and how I could afford to stay in this small rental on solely my salary.
For the most part, peace lived in our space during daylight hours even as my first husband in the hospital bed in the living room was dying a little more each day. But there were those regular 3:00 AM awake moments when an uninvited thief showed up to steal my peace. Always in the dark.
It’s challenging to care for a disabled child, an aging parent, a dying spouse. To create a new life as a single parent. To rebuild after financial ruin. To live alone as a widow/er. Paul, the apostle who experienced beatings and shipwrecks and imprisonment, wrote something that seems a bit oxymoronic:
“Sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; poor, yet making many rich; having nothing, and yet possessing everything” (2 Corinthians 6:10, NIV).
How does that work? It makes no earthly sense for joy to be mixed in with the sorrow, or to enrich the lives of others when we’ve lost so much. And yet God invites us to lose and gain, to rejoice in our suffering, to possess the most important things while having nothing.
Our tendency, as humans, is toward anxiety, toward allowing sumo wrestlers into our bedrooms at 3:00 AM. Oswald Chambers called it unbelief:
“Worrying means we do not believe that God can look after the practical details of our lives … The greatest word of Jesus to his disciples is abandon.”
Abandon means to surrender. And surrender sounds like admitting defeat, like I’m giving up. But there is no giving up of my faith or pursuit of God. Abandon merely means letting go of my agenda, my timing, my way.
And with beautiful surrender comes peace because we release the thing that causes anxiety. We relinquish the child on drugs to the One who created him and loves him so much more than we ever could. We hand over cancer, Alzheimer’s, ALS to the One who wasn’t caught off guard by this devastating diagnosis. We yield our worries about how we’re going to make ends meet to the One who has already made provision for our widowed or single-parent status. We cannot heal this body that won’t carry a child to full term. We can do absolutely nothing about the cutbacks at work. We can’t change the mind of the spouse who wants to leave. But we can lean in to God with this unbearable thing and leave it there with Him. And when we discover we’ve taken the unbearable thing upon our shoulders again, we go back. And back. And back. To the Father.
It’s impossible to live contentedly and worry-free with so much loss.
Yet, God asks the impossible of us.
The act of abandoning my wants, my hopes, and my self—this is what helped wash away the anxiety. This non-intuitive way of life—speaking gratitude in our sorrow, making many rich out of our scarcity, living contentedly after losing so much—ushers in peace and shows the sumo wrestlers to the door. It makes what we have, enough.
