Learning to Surrender All

Take my life and let it be

consecrated, Lord, to thee.

Take my moments and my days;

let them flow in endless praise,

let them flow in endless praise.

On Feb. 13 I walked through the front door of the cozy split-level home that hosted our monthly women’s book club, and I noticed the atmosphere was somber, almost grim. As I deposited my shoes by the door and found a spot in the circle of chairs I began to pick up on strands of conversation.

“He doesn’t know as of now whether this business trip, scheduled for next week, will happen or not. He might not know until he gets to the airport!”

“Right now no one knows how this will impact our special needs programs.”

“Most of my company’s contracts come from school construction. I am not worried about losing my job tomorrow, but there are far-reaching effects I don’t think people are thinking about.”

I noticed Kelly* sat in her usual seat, shoulders hunched up, arms folded across her body, and her expression cloudy. When the talk came around to her she looked up and said in a flat voice, “I think I may have to fire people, and I don’t know if my business will survive this.”

Everyone in the room that night had an employment worry to share—if not them, then their husband or son or daughter had a connection to the U.S. federal government. Since the end of January, the White House had become the epicenter of a series of earthquakes for federal employees, and it had left us all feeling a bit unsteady.

Earlier that week during a coffee break women’s Bible study, prayer requests had likewise swirled around the fear and uncertainty, the anxiety, and general discombobulation that families were experiencing.

“Should we leave?”

“Where would we go?”

“All our friends are here.”

Take my hands and let them move

at the impulse of thy love.

Take my feet and let them be

swift and beautiful for thee,

swift and beautiful for thee.

Silver Spring Christian Reformed Church is in Silver Spring, Md., one of the Washington, D.C., suburbs. There is an interstate that circles D.C. called the Beltway. Half of it runs through Virginia, half through Maryland. Our church is just north of the Beltway. The map of where our congregation lives and works scatters north and south of the Beltway, with a few outliers reaching all the way out to Annapolis and Baltimore. We have patent examiners and NASA engineers. We have State Department employees and people with military backgrounds. We also have lawyers and accountants and health care workers, some of whom are employed by the government or connected through a contractor with the government. Our congregation is filled with Calvin- and Dordt-trained people who are faithfully following God’s call to work in this square inch of the map. Over the winter of 2025, it became a square inch that increasingly felt like a wilderness.

How fitting, then, that this period of unease and uncertainty overlapped at least in part with Lent. Our pastoral team decided to follow the Lent worship series I had been a part of writing for Reformed Worship. The theme of that series was “Having the Identity of a Servant,” and I brought it to our worship team planning meeting with some trepidation. Would this theme feel inauthentic or perhaps offensive for a community wrestling with employment? After all, many of us have heard throughout our lives that the work we do, we do for God, in service to God.

If someone loses their work or is questioning their line of work, will they feel adrift in their ability to connect with a Lent theme focused on service to God? What I learned over the course of that Lenten season focused on this theme was that living a life of committed service to God transcends the circumstances of our lives. Yes, service to God can and does happen in, through, and because of the work we do from Monday to Friday, but “having the identity of a servant” runs much deeper and grounds us when the circumstances of our lives leave us feeling adrift.

Take my voice and let me sing

always, only, for my King.

Take my lips and let them be

filled with messages from thee,

filled with messages from thee.

“What about ‘Take My Life and Let It Be’ as a theme song?”

I don’t remember who proposed that song out of the six of us gathered with butcher paper and sticky notes taped all over the walls to brainstorm the services for Lent, but the idea stuck. Someone noticed that there were six verses and six Sundays in Lent.

“What if we connected a different verse to each week of the series?”

As a worship planner, there are times when I’m blessed with the grace of feeling the Spirit at work in the planning and preparation of worship. This was one such time. In that planning meeting, through the choice of the theme song the team linked service to God with surrender to God. I felt my fears begin to ebb as I contemplated something that perhaps should have been obvious to me from the beginning.

The call to live a life of service is less about what we bring to God than that we hold our lives loosely, attentive to God’s call. Perhaps that truth, more than any other, was what this body needed to hear right now.

Take my will and make it thine;

it shall be no longer mine.

Take my heart it is thine own;

it shall be thy royal throne,

it shall be thy royal throne.

“How are you doing” “Is your family doing well?” “Is your husband still employed?” I typed and deleted, typed and deleted the text message I wanted to send to a friend I was trying to make lunch plans with. Every day a new headline brought to mind a different person I knew and I wondered if their world had started crumbling around them. Then there were the rumors and word of mouth. People’s names were being put on lists. So-and-so had gotten an email that didn’t sound good.

Kelly and her husband decided to move. Her business depended in part on federal grant money; the instability of those funds led them to speed up their long-term plans to relocate. I was sad at the impending loss of this friend from our community, but, more than that, I was angry.

When my 4-year-old finds his choices and agency slipping away, especially around bedtime (“yes, we have to brush our teeth every night”), he scrunches up his face, bares his teeth, stomps his foot, and lets out noise louder than a grunt and usually a little softer than a scream. I felt like I was doing this to God internally a lot during the months of March and April.

“Why God?” “How long, God?” “This too, God?” In the midst of calls to surrender, our community also had to make space to communicate our honest emotions. We needed to lament.

Take my silver and my gold;

not a mite would I withhold.

Take my intellect and use

every power as thou shalt choose,

every power as thou shalt choose.

To visually communicate our progression through service and surrender, the worship team constructed a temporary installation in our sanctuary. We have chairs rather than pews, so we widened our center aisle by several chairs and brought in sturdy overturned bins that we covered in glossy purple table cloths to represent a series of “altars” or “tables.” Each week we placed symbolic items on those tables that reminded us what we offered up to God, what we surrendered to his service. One week it was a clock, another week we placed gardening tools there, remembering that we submitted to the work of the master gardener.

On the fifth Sunday of Lent, the week before Palm Sunday, we were planning to talk about surrendering our material lives to God—possessions, finances, etc. I needed a piggy bank. I sent out the call to the congregation: did anyone have a piggy bank that the worship team could borrow? Gladys came through for me. One of the church’s matriarchs, she quietly served behind the scenes in almost every ministry. The piggy bank was a memento from her college days, and I vowed to take good care of it.

During the children’s message, I gathered the children around the altar with the piggy bank. The snout of the pig had a large cork stopper I had removed and I had scattered pennies all over the altar. I had a deacon assist me as we talked with the kids about living lives like an open piggy bank—being generous and sharing with people in need. I had invited families to bring loose change to church and the children helped gather this up and place it by the piggy bank to be used in a collection for one of our church’s missionaries.

As I thought back over the service, I was struck by how many in our congregation lived much like Gladys who had lent me the pig—they lived open-handed lives despite the turbulence of the present moment and through many past turbulent times as well. Many members of the church showed me what it meant to surrender themselves to God.

Take my love; my Lord, I pour

at thy feet its treasure store.

Take myself, and I will be

ever, only, all for thee,

ever, only, all for thee.

We arrived at Holy Week at long last, but a shadow lay over the week for our congregation. Gladys, the same beloved member of our church who had donated the piggy bank, was in the hospital, having suddenly fallen ill, and the news from her family was increasingly grim. When word of her passing circulated on Monday morning of Holy Week, I remember feeling empty. My art journal from that time focused on 2 Chronicles 20:9,12: “We will cry out to you in our distress. … We do not know what to do, but our eyes are on you.”

I cried on and off in my office all week as I prepared for Good Friday and Easter Sunday. It seemed grossly unfair to me that in a season of our church filled with instability and sacrifice, God would take yet more from us. We were surrendering already. We were trusting God already.

Grief has a way of making seem irrelevant some theological truths that are easier to stoically assert at calmer times of life: “God’s timing is not ours;” “God works all things for the good of those who love him;” “God is in control.” When grief swamps my mind, I want to snatch back control, not surrender it. In the arrogance that grief engenders I want to speak to God about my life like I would to my 4-year-old who had found a sharp knife: “I’m not sure you can be trusted with that; you might hurt somebody.”

I arrived at Good Friday feeling raw, like my soul had been subjected to a cheese grater. It was a joint service with our sister congregation in D.C. Both congregations had experienced some painful events over the course of Lent, and Pastor Ben opened with an acknowledgement that helped me settle and refocus:

On Good Friday, we come to survey the wondrous cross, on which our prince of glory died. … For many of us, this Holy Week has felt heavier. The fragility of life feels nearer to us at the DC Reformed Church, and the pain of death feels nearer to our friends at the Silver Spring CRC with the sudden passing of Gladys. Our church is mourning with you. And we don’t have to leave behind these emotions at the door. If anything, Good Friday is precisely where God invites us to bring our hearts. Today, we come to see a love stronger than death. We remember the sacrifice of our Lord with gratitude because his death gives us life and brings redemption to the world.

Yes, there was uncertainty, grief, turbulence, and sacrifice. And the Lenten practice of surrender and service didn’t mean that we were somehow exempt from these things in the future. Rather, we were better prepared for them and we knew we didn’t go through them alone. Someone had gone through all this and more on our behalf. He can, in fact, be entrusted with all of our lives, and we can rest in the sure confidence of his love.

*Names changed.