The Immediate Reward for Trustful Surrender

Have you ever done an act purely out of love for God? If you are like most of us, you always have some ulterior motive when you perform spiritual and corporal works of mercy. When you pray for the dead, are you not hoping that someday they will pray for you when they reach heaven? When you feed the homeless, are you not hoping that God will remember you when you come into His kingdom?

You do not deserve much blame for this. It was God Himself who infused you with self-preservation. Still, you may consider purifying your motives by increasing your selflessness and decreasing your selfish impulses.

Because God is a loving Father, He offers us not only the eternal reward of Himself but also an earthly reward for surrendering ourselves to Him. And He wants you to experience this immediate reward. He even wants you to seek this immediate reward.

God is not hiding this gift from you. He has no desire to “surprise” you with peace and happiness. He has told you repeatedly that there is a reward waiting for you right now!

The obvious reward for trustfully surrendering to Divine Providence is the ultimate reward: paradise. This is obvious, this is simple, but it is not easy.

As we can see in the life of Christ, what is easy can also turn your heart to stone. It is easy to believe that your salvation is found in the routine practice of traditions, like the scribes and Pharisees. Christ showed little patience with those who ruthlessly held the letter of the law over the heads of the vulnerable (see Matt. 23:27).

Clinging to the law can become the antithesis of trustful surrender. It can become a heretical notion that in order to be saved, you must do rituals in this or that precise way, as if God is bound by words and subtle motions. Such clinging to the practices and procedures of our Faith can be a prideful way of believing that God is indebted to us rather than the opposite. In other words, “I did these things just right, and so You must give me heaven.”

When you place your faith in externals, you enter the realm of many, many problems. You feel the pressure to perform each and every religious gesture with a ritualistic purity. You feel a need to outperform your fellow Christians. You feel the need to rattle off more and more prayers. Yes, you must pray, for there is no hope of heaven without sincere prayer and repentance. But without trustfully surrendering to God’s will, your prayers are nothing but lip service to Him. And like the scribes and Pharisees, you can easily become “whited sepulchers” (Matt. 23:27).

The less obvious rewards for trustful surrender in this life are peace and happiness. This can be seen on both a natural and supernatural level.

On a natural level, you experience peace when numerous problems are removed. Think of the last time you made an extensive to-do list, and the sight of it was overwhelming. The list was like a tsunami of anxiety and fatigue. But imagine if someone took away the list and said, “I will handle everything on this list except for your first priority. Go and focus on that one thing. Leave the rest to me.” Imagine! You would feel not only relief from the many smaller problems but also energized to go tackle your number one priority.

On a supernatural level, God desires that you be at peace right now! As the Divine Physician, He may well send you suffering for the purpose of spiritual healing. But suffering and peace are not mutually exclusive.

Trustful surrender causes all of your perceived problems to dissipate instantly, for you believe that God ordains everything for your salvation. When you solve your one true problem, the grace of Almighty God washes away the many perceived problems that previously debilitated you. You are then free to experience the peace and happiness that has always awaited you.

Consider the good thief on the cross, Saint Dismas. He hung in agony, struggling to take every breath. There was no chance of survival. No friends or family would take him from the cross. He would either hang for days or have his legs broken to expedite the suffocation. But what did he do? In his last moments, he surrendered to Jesus Christ, asking for mercy: “Lord, remember me when thou shalt come into thy kingdom” (Luke 23:42). As the face of Jesus turned towards him, stained with blood from the crown of thorns, Dismas felt a moment of anticipation. How would Our Lord respond?

In what seemed like an eternity in Dismas’s mind, Our Lord gave the greatest pardon ever, “Amen I say to thee, this day thou shalt be with me in paradise” (Luke 23:43). He did not say you’ll eventually be with Me. He did not say you’ll be with My angels in paradise. He said that this day, Dismas, you will be with Me in paradise.

Imagine the peace and happiness that overshadowed the agony of the cross! Dismas could have asked Our Lord to miraculously spare his bodily life, but he did not. Do you think Dismas, the good thief who stole heaven, would have traded paradise in order to come down from the cross? I don’t think so. Nothing in Dismas’s life could ever compare to the peace and happiness that he felt at that moment while hanging in agony on a cross.

But Saint Dismas’s peace came only after the greatest war of his life, the war for his soul. Unlike Judas, Dismas repented because he realized that all of his problems boiled down to one problem: whether or not his heart and his will were surrendered to the Man dying next to him. Certainly, the devil was tempting Dismas to despair, but grace was calling Dismas to trust.

In his moments of intense agony, Saint Dismas experienced a light from the cross. He realized that the Romans were no longer his problem, his wounds and sins from his life were no longer his problem, his inability to physically bow before Jesus was no longer his problem. Paradise was now in Saint Dismas’s soul because he discovered the secret of peace and happiness in this life: surrender.

Some mystics attribute Saint Dismas’s conversion to Our Lady’s prayers at the foot of the cross. After all, she was the most perfect woman of surrender and the queen of martyrs. Her entire life involved preparing her Son for His passion and death. If Our Lady can help Dismas in his final moments, what can she do for you right now?

The happiest moments of Saint Dismas’s life were experienced while he was dying on a cross. Where are your peace and happiness to be found?

It may sound trite. It may sound contrived. It may sound like a Christian gimmick. But the lives of the saints prove otherwise. You can always get what you always want. If you only desire the will of God, then everything that happens to you is exactly what you want to happen to you.

You experience this phenomenon in minute ways with those you love. Have you ever had a sick child and wanted to do what they wanted you to do? You love them so much that you just wanted to be of service. It was not an inconvenience for you to suffer a little for them. You wanted to do something to show your love. In a way, the greater the sacrifice you could make for them, the better it would make you feel. What loving parent would not gladly take the cancer away from their child? Would he do this begrudgingly? No! He would do it because he wants to.

When you love God above yourself, you desire to experience what He has prepared for you. It is as if the Divine Author has written your story out of love, and you desperately desire to see how everything plays out.

There is no gimmick. If you truly love the Lord, you want only what He wants. The perfect prayer is this: Lord, I wish to only wish what you wish, or best spoken by Our Lord Himself, Fiat Voluntas Tua (“Thy will be done”) (Matt. 6:10).

Editor’s Note: Deepen your trustful surrender to Our Lord by praying Fr. Don Dolindo’s Surrender Novena.

This article is adapted from a chapter in Conor Gallagher’s You Have Only One Problem: Experience the Instant Reward of Trustful Surrender, available from TAN Books.

Image from Wikimedia Commons