How we can, and why we should, embrace our everyday powerlessness
By Mark A. Taylor
Do any of these situations feel familiar to you?
• Sitting in a cluttered kitchen with children whose school-at-home work bores them and baffles you.
• Listening to a self-possessed supervisor drone on about how to do your job and help her reach her goals.
• Coping with criticism from a customer or kid or email correspondent who won’t stop long enough to hear your explanations.
• Struggling to decide how the number at the bottom of your checkbook can cover the tally of that month’s bills.
• Waiting at the bedside of a failing parent, watching for signs of life, dreading the end while hoping it will come soon.
• Wrestling with your own failure and deciding whether and when and to whom you’ll admit it.
In all these situations—and in a dozen more like them from our everyday journey—we feel powerless. But our affluence fools us into thinking we’re in control. By the world’s standards we are among the wealthiest on the planet. We purchase and remodel and travel and dress and eat and enjoy mostly what we want, when we want, how we want. But in the difficult crossroads of life (and for some of us, our map is littered with them), we have no power.
Coping with powerlessness
My own life experience has been a path toward admitting and then deciding how to cope with my powerlessness. Believe me, I know how others should behave. I recognize all the errors in their decisions. They never ask me how to run their lives or do their jobs or conduct their ministries, but I could sure tell them if they would. But as I reflect on the assortment of my own misjudgments and shortcomings, as I force myself to stare into the secret chambers of my own dark heart, I realize I shouldn’t be surprised. There’s as much in me to avoid as to imitate.
And so I resonated with Dean when he wrote about power. The disciples couldn’t heal because they were depending more on themselves than on God. The Pharisees couldn’t prevail because they were more interested in protecting their interests than in discovering and submitting to the mysteries of God’s will.
Maybe an advantage of advancing age is realizing how little power we have. We spend thousands on doctors and drugs, but we can only delay—never permanently reverse—the body’s deterioration. We watch our children do what they will, and finally (sometimes decades later than this should have happened) we yield control. We retire from enterprises we tried to shape in our image only to discover that overnight the next guy’s vision replaces ours.
Maybe an advantage of advancing age is realizing how little power we have.
We have only as much power as God grants us, and slowly we learn to seek and submit to his power for his purposes instead of for our own. “Pray more and plan less,” Dean wrote. “Some situations change only by the power of prayer.”
Nothing else works!
It’s possible—actually it’s common—to pray when nothing else will work. The fact is that nothing else will ever work as well as it can with prayer. Somewhere I read, “Pray as if everything depends on God, and then work as if everything depends on you.” We do have power to obey, to surrender, to accept what life throws at us without insisting that God tell us why. Moses had the power to raise his staff before the seething sea. And then God showed his power, the power we can’t muster, the power we need, the power to charge forward without drowning in the watery wall of threat surrounding us.
I’m learning, still learning, to pray for that power—and for the grace to accept and use it for God and not for myself.
Dean’s column this Tuesday made me think about this post I wrote last fall at the height of the pandemic in the U.S. Although I couldn’t fully realize then how much all of us would be called upon to embrace powerlessness, I understand now how much the need still persists. So I decided to repost this, and I hope it encourages someone today.
Photo by Amaury Gutierrez on Unsplash
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