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Surrender is the discovery that we are in a river of love and that we float without having to do anything. 

—David Benner, Surrender to Love  

Richard Rohr considers how surrender is simply accepting the reality that we are not in control: 

If we cannot control life and death, why do we spend so much time trying to control smaller outcomes? 

Call it destiny, providence, guidance, synchronicity, or coincidence, but people who are connected to the Source do not need to steer their own life and agenda. They know that it is being done for them in a much better way than they ever could. Those who hand themselves over are received, and the flow happens through them. Those who don’t relinquish control are still received, but they significantly slow down the natural flow of Spirit.  

When we set ourselves up to think we deserve, expect, or need certain things to happen, we are setting ourselves up for constant unhappiness and a final inability to enjoy or at least allow what is going to happen anyway. 

After a while, we find ourselves resisting almost everything at some level. It is a terrible way to live. Giving up control is a school to learn union, compassion, and understanding. It is ultimately a school for the final letting go that we call death. 

Right now, as we face social uncertainty, economic fragility, and the vulnerability of our own bodies, is there something deeper that we can surrender to, that can ground us in disruption?  

Surrendering to the divine flow is not about giving in, capitulating, becoming a puppet, being naïve, being irresponsible, or stopping all planning and thinking. 

Surrender is about a peaceful inner opening that keeps the conduit of living water flowing to love. 

I am confident in this: every time we surrender to love, we have also just chosen to die. Every time we let love orient us, we are letting go of ourselves as an autonomous unit and have given a bit of ourselves away to something or someone else, and it is not easily retrieved—unless we choose to stop loving—which many do. But even then, when that expanded self wants to retreat back into itself, it realizes it is