Tonight at Kairos, Aaron Bryant taught about one of the most dangerous prayers you can pray: Lord, take me. Lord, I surrender to You.

I know from experience some of the most dangerous prayers I’ve prayed have been when I asked for patience and when I prayed, “Thy will be done.”

The joke is that you should never pray for patience unless you want what little patience you already have to be supremely tested. If you do pray for patience, you will find out just how impatient you really are. God will bring people into your life that bring out the worst in you and put you in situations that make you wanna cuss. But in all of that, God is slowly changing you so that you are slightly more patient today than you were a week ago.

I’ve found that when you pray, “Thy will be done,” you are also praying, “My will be undone.” I learned that from one of the wisest women and authors I have ever come across, Elisabeth Elliot. To pray, “Thy will be done,” means I am willing to let go of some cherished dreams and plans and goals if they aren’t a part of God’s will. It means to have desires denied and longings go unfulfilled sometimes, but it means that for every thing I give up, I gain something 1000 times better.

Still, the hardest prayer right now for me to pray is, “Lord, I surrender.” Even now there’s a fear that God isn’t really for me and won’t do what’s best for me if I give up control. There’s the illusion that my plans really are better than God’s plans.

Ultimately, I only have to look back at my life to see those aren’t true at all. God has never been anything but good to me. God has always been for me and God has never ever done anything less than the very best for me.

I guess as long as I have my old nature still hanging around and my self-will still battling for control, surrender will never be an easy thing to do. But to borrow a quote from the Soul Surfer movie, right now I don’t want easy; I just want possible.