A Ramble About Being Powerless

I feel powerless right now. Totally and utterly powerless as I sit here typing on my laptop. The circumstances surrounding myself and my family feel like they’ve reached a crescendo which there is literally nothing I can do. The demons, whether they be literal or figurative depending on your point of view, which seem to have habitually harassed myself and my family for decades now seem to be on an all out no holds bar assault on multiple fronts and I just feel totally powerless against them.

And all I can do is pray.

Often, this last line is seen as something which is said out of desperation. Often, many people see reaching out to an unseen higher power, regardless of the higher power in question, as one step removed from lunacy. I have actually been accused of this when defending my faith against a friend once.

All I can do now is pray.

Thing is, I feel powerless, but amidst all the anxiety and depression which that feeling brings on, I also feel a strange peace as well. In recognizing that I am powerless amidst all this, I am only accepting reality as it is… as it always is. It is an illusion that we cling to to say that we have power over our own lives. We are responsible for our choices, but we cannot control the storm of choices, decisions, and interactions among other people and events which affect our lives. That storm constantly rages even when we are oblivious to it and we are affected by it even if we had nothing to do with creating it or the direction it takes; much like the hurricanes which recently hit the eastern coast of the United States, or the fires which are hitting northern and southern California right now destroying thousands of buildings, taking lives, and creating devastation which none of those in its path were responsible for in any way.

As a Christian, the recognition of my personal powerlessness is a necessity for drawing closer to God through Jesus Christ. You see, human beings have this habit of not relying on God for anything unless they feel it’s impossible for them. We have this contradictory habit of thinking that we know what is best, we have the power to chart our own course, we can somehow alter the storm or somehow we are in command of it. As a result, God allows the storm to surround us and overwhelm us at times in order to bring us to our senses and make us realize that we have control of nothing. He doesn’t ask us to surrender our control to Him. We have no control to begin with. He asks us to surrender our illusion of control to him. He asks us to face reality, something which human beings frequently do not want to acknowledge is different from what they want it to be.

The only one who is truly not powerless is God Himself. But He will not interfere with human free will. He will guide, He will direct, He will attempt to get us to see reason, sometimes the hard way; but he will not override our free will however far into the depths of lunacy that free will might take us.

I am much reminded in the midst of feeling utterly powerless, that this is where I actually need to be. All my illusions dispelled and reality laid bare. And once I let go of those illusions, that is when peace begins to settle in. Once I cease to be attached to the way I think things should be, that’s when the storm within begins to settle down regardless of the storm without. I am powerless, but God is not. And He hears the voice of those who cry out to Him and responds.