On Sabbaticals and Surrender

Today is the seventh anniversary of CORDA’s founding, and if I’m honest, for months I’d been kind of dreading it.

Weird, right? Rather than looking forward to this milestone with gratitude, in my head I had been building up this particular anniversary as a test of how “successful” CORDA had become.

See, I had this vague understanding of how, for the Jewish people, the seventh year was special: it was ordained by God to be an entire year of sabbath, a year when they didn’t tend the land or prune their vines, but rather rested from that work, and let the very earth rest, too (Lev 25:2-5).

And my impression was that this was like a yearlong vacation. I mean, an entire year where you didn’t have to plant, work the fields, or harvest! How cool would it be if CORDA could do something amazing for its sabbatical year, like give away all our candles for a year, or maybe even not make candles at all but take a whole year just to deep dive into the lives of the saints and work on lots of new scents or something! And because I’m really good at putting pressure on myself, on some level I started thinking that if CORDA wasn’t in a place to do something like this for our seventh year, something spectacular, well, then, I had failed.

But God has a sense of humor, and it wasn’t until only a couple days ago that I realized that our seventh anniversary means we actually just finished our seventh year, and today marks the beginning of year eight! All this time I’ve been giving myself a hard time about what I needed to do to make the seventh year something special, and it turns out I missed it completely! There’s a life lesson in that, for sure.

And I realized I’d been missing something else, too: the sabbatical year wasn’t something the Jewish people achieved or earned, it was something God made possible. Something that required complete trust and surrender by the Jewish people - after all, how in the world would everyone eat and survive if no one was tending the land for an entire year? 

Rather than the sabbatical year being a vacation from “real life,” it was a real life reminder of what life is really about: continually surrendering to God. For Israel, this meant surrendering themselves, their livelihoods, their families, the very food they would need day after day, as well as their future, and letting him take care of everything. It certainly gives a new context to “Give us this day our daily bread.”

The God who promised the Jewish people he would care for them is the same God taking care of you and me at this very moment. Even when we can’t fathom how things will work out, even when we subtly turn away from him and turn in on ourselves, trying to take care of everything on our own, he is good, and he is faithful.

* * *

In all honesty, this has been very hard for me to accept in my life - that God loves me, first of all, and that he is trustworthy and his plan is good, and he will take care of me. 

For many, many years, in fact, I was really angry at God, and felt betrayed by him, and I kept him as far away from my heart as I could, while also blaming him for being so far from me. And there have been times when I didn’t know if I honestly believed whether he was even real.

But in his humility, God gave me a deep love for the saints, and they’ve been my lifeline to him - even when I wasn’t sure if God was there or if he was trustworthy, I saw that John Paul II and Mother Teresa and Kateri and Pier Giorgio and Damien and Maximilian and all the countless others did know that God was real, and showed it with their very lives. They loved God, and I loved them, so I did my best to trust in their trust in God.

While there are still many things in my life I wish God would just take away or change, he’s helping me see that what really needs to change is me.

If that sounds trite, or all too easy to say, believe me I know. But I’m trying to see that the hard moments of life can be a gift from him, and that they hold a profound invitation to give our “fiat” - to be faced with something that seems overwhelming, scary, impossible, or incomprehensible, and to trust in the very midst of that and say “thy will be done.” 

Not when I feel like it, not when I understand how things will work out, not when things feel safe and under control, not when everything is calm, not when it’s easy to hope, but precisely when it seems like the boat is sinking and God doesn’t even care (Mar 4:37-39).

If we cry out to him and give our fiat, he will give us his peace, calming the storm in our hearts (Mar 4:40).

That doesn’t necessarily mean we immediately experience things as better, or that things will change the way we want them to. In fact, as the Surrender Novena reminds us, not only will God lead us on paths different from the ones we think we want - he warns us that he must. And it can be incredibly hard to let go of the path we prefer, and to willingly accept where we actually are and surrender everything to him, including the fear that trusting him could leave us worse off.

St. Therese shows us so clearly how to surrender. In difficult moments, she would think of herself as a little child who, with all her weaknesses and imperfections, would confidently throw her arms up to God her Father, for him to pick her up, wrap his arms around her, press her to his cheek, and carry her through. Not that long ago, it would have felt impossible for me to even imagine being that vulnerable and trusting with God, and to allow my moments of suffering and sorrow to bring me closer to him rather than further away. But God is good, and he is faithful.

If you feel like you can’t trust that right now, believe me, I understand. I’m praying that you hold on to the holy men and women who have gone before us, and trust in their trust in God who loves us. They are praying for you, too.

As Michael and I enter this eighth year of CORDA, with immense gratitude, we entrust anew this business, ourselves, and you to God’s love and providence. O Jesus, we surrender ourselves to you; take care of everything.