“Life’s deaths always feel like big deaths until you let go. After you let go, you wonder, what was the big deal.” – Jennie Allen
One of the foundational concepts of our faith is revealed in Luke 9:23, where Jesus says, “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me.” That’s a verse worth sitting with. Are we truly open to living this way? The message of the gospel is radical. It calls us to complete surrender—to lay down our ways for God's way (Romans 12:1-2). And let’s be honest: that’s not always easy. Surrender often requires sacrifice, inconvenience, and discomfort.
Jennie Allen, in her book Anything: The Prayer That Unlocked My God and My Soul, writes:
“It is too easy in this country for blessings to become rights, for stuff and money to become what calls the shots in our lives. And before you know it, God’s gifts have replaced God himself.”
Not everyone is called to leave their family and possessions behind to serve as a missionary in Afghanistan. Not everyone will be asked to walk away from a well-paying job for full-time ministry. But here’s the real question: if God asked you to make a sacrifice, would you do it?
The answer to that lies in how we perceive God. If we truly believe He loves us, cares for us, and has the best for us, then letting go becomes less about loss and more about trust. That doesn’t mean it will always feel easy—God stretches our faith by calling us to trust Him even when we don’t see the outcome. But at its core, leting go is about trust.
And here’s the beauty of it: the more we practice surrender, the more our faith grows. The things that once seemed like unbeatable giants start to shrink in comparison to God’s greatness. Jennie Allen puts it like this:
“The ironic thing about believing in God and supernatural things is that the invisible stuff is actually the most trustworthy, the most stable. So the concrete things we can see and touch, they become the wind, they become the things we try to catch, and over and over, they pass through our fingers and souls, keeping us empty.”
May we fix our eyes on Jesus, the One who never fails, and set our hearts on things above (Colossians 3:2).
