The Thin Lines Between Apathy, Despair and Surrender

I was absolutely slammed when I returned back to work after my paternity leave. My colleagues were gracious in covering for me during my absence, and my boss was accommodating, but the amount of work and responsibilities that were being rapidly handed back to me and the volume of people who wanted my attention, time, and bandwidth were incredible. I was quickly overwhelmed with navigating through people's different (strong and vocal) opinions and perspectives on business priorities I needed to help shape, processes I needed to help drive, and imperatives that I needed to communicate. Before soon, I found myself under the rubble of requests with little time to breathe, let alone prioritize or organize. And I actually did miss the time I spent with my kids. Yeah, you could say that the first week of work was rough.

Thankfully, I think spiritually I've become more equipped to deal with these things. Don't get me wrong, it was still a stressful week, but what God has impressed upon me over the years is that there's freedom in surrender. That's surrender, not despair or apathy. Both are ways to deal with the problem when you realize that "stressful obsession" is not where you want to be.

There's a couple of important distinctions here. Using the work example, apathy manifests itself anywhere from a "I just don't give a f!#% anymore. If I get fired, I just don't care," which was played to perfection by Ron Livingston in the hilarious movie "Office Space". This often is accompanied with a bravado around irresponsibility, which while funny in the movie, isn't just or right. And then there's despair, which at it's most extreme case manifests itself in a horrible "I don't want to deal with this s!@# anymore. I'm going to kill myself". There's escape here, yes, but not quite the same thing as the "surrender" that I'm trying to convey.

Faithful surrender, in the Christian sense, is not the same as apathy or despair. Surrender entails holding on to that which you already know deep down is true, but is occluded by the mess of the everyday and the fears stilted by only what you can see. To the Christian, our faith already dictates that you live under a sovereign and loving God. As opposed to despair which finds no hope; surrender finds hope in the appeal to Someone. Using that same work example, instead of stressful obsession or despair, surrender involves the conscious decision to recognize that God is in control of the trajectory of our success and our failure - our responsibility is to be responsible stewards (or "do the best you can" in non-Christian lingo) and trust God with the results, come what may. This isn't fatalism, by the way - God's providence, while at times bitter, will always ultimately be good. Fate makes no such promises.

So in the rat race surrounded by many others who are similarly burdened, surrendering in the midst of stress is, ironically, freeing. But I'll concede that watching Peter Gibbons go fishing during work hours and cheerfully laugh off demands from his boss and consultants has some cathartic value, too.