Where's my Surrender?

I'm so thankful for all of the precious people who love on my kiddos each week at church. Whenever my kids ask where we are going and I say, "Church!" they all get SO excited!

I know this is because not only are people showing their love to my kids, but even more importantly, they are showing God's love to my kids. Sometimes they even gift them with things, which totally tickles the kids. Annie came home with a green necklace one day from Miss Jeanie,
Lucy comes home frequently with things from Mr. Tom's class, and Gabriel came home today with a huge plastic syringe to "squirt water with" that he said Miss Ann gave to him.
He was quite proud and possessive of this new "toy," and as we got in the car after lunch, he said, "Where's my surrender??" 

"Your what, Gabriel?"

"My surrender!"

We soon realized he meant his syringe :)

I know he's just a little boy (and an adorable one at that!)
who got his words mixed up, but I found myself stopping for a moment and repeating his phrase to myself:

"Where is my surrender...?"

It seems a bit counter-productive to be searching for something that you've supposedly laid down, and yet it also seems that this happens pretty often.  In the Christian walk, we are called to die to ourselves--to surrender to God and make Him the Lord of our lives. We lay down all of ourself so that we can put on all of Him. This doesn't just include our sins that we confess before Him, but it also includes our hopes and our dreams,
trusting that His plan is far greater than our own. What a tremendous, ugly mystery that Jesus would put on our sin so that we could clothe ourselves in His Father's gift of righteousness! The idea of being made new is quite enticing...until we realize that the process can also be a bit painful. We claim that we surrender our lives to Him, and yet we often find ourselves coming back searching for where we laid it all down. In a sense, we ask, "Where's my surrender?" But when I give Jesus "my surrender," it is no longer mine--it's not a toy that I can place on a shelf one day and then decide to pull it back out. 

Romans 12:1 says this:

"Therefore, I urge you my brothers, in view of God's mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God. This is your spiritual act of worship."

The less there is of me, the more room there is for Him to fill me up and be poured out on others. And just like that syringe acts as Gabriel's new way of squirting out water, our lives can be used to spread the hope and glory of Christ as refreshment to others...