God Running is a place for anyone who wants to love Jesus more deeply, follow Jesus more closely, and love people the way Jesus wants us to.

“Jesus does not ask for great deeds but only for gratitude and self-surrender.”

–St. Thérèse of Lisieux

The Blessing of Self-Surrender

In today’s quote from St. Thérèse, she mentions gratitude. I wrote about gratitude recently, so if you’re interested you can check that out here: Gratitude: Another Attribute of the Friends We Choose. But in today’s quote, St. Thérèse also mentions self-surrender, and that’s what I want to focus on in this article. I find what she says about self-surrender interesting because of all the tragedy in her life. Her mother died when she was only four years old. When she was fifteen years old her father suffered a debilitating stroke and he died when Thérèse was only twenty-one. At twenty-three, she contracted tuberculosis and it spread to her intestines. She suffered from severe hemorrhaging, and she died the next year.

During my research on St. Thérèse, I came across this account in a Wikipedia article:

When she was near death, “her physical suffering kept increasing so that even the doctor himself was driven to exclaim, ‘Ah! If you only knew what this young nun was suffering!'” During the last hours of Thérèse’s life, she said, “I would never have believed it was possible to suffer so much, never, never!” In July 1897, she made a final move to the monastery infirmary. On 19 August 1897, she received her last communion. She died on 30 September 1897, aged 24. On her deathbed, she is reported to have said, “I have reached the point of not being able to suffer any more, because all suffering is sweet to me.” Her last words were, “My God, I love you!”

I hope you can forgive my analytical bent and find a way to appreciate the graph I shared at the top of this article. This is a series on following Christ for exhausted people, and the graph speaks to the way Christ’s peace is tied to self-surrender, and how a lack of self-surrender produces anxiety. I realize anxiety isn’t exhaustion itself, but in my experience anxiety and depression are unwanted companions of exhaustion. The graph illustrates what I’ve found to be true over my lifetime. My observation has been that, like St. Thérèse of Lisieux, people who surrender themselves to Christ experience a huge blessing. And that blessing is God’s peace.

But what does that mean, “surrender?” We talk about it an awful lot, but what we mean isn’t always the best articulated. And, I think, in certain states of mind, the idea of surrender can be received incorrectly.

Your average person would probably associate “surrender” with giving up. You throw up the white flag, you’re done, you’ll stop fighting, you failed. It certainly could mean that in many cases. I think this particular inclination is another unwanted companion of exhaustion, and if you’ve ever found yourself on the left side of that graph, this might sound familiar to you. You try so, so hard to follow what God has placed in front of you, all of the responsibilities and emergencies and day-to-day humdrummery, all the while trying to pursue what God has placed on your heart. You might find there’s just too much in front of you and you can’t keep up. You might be racking your brain to reconcile what’s in front of you with what God has placed on your heart because they seem to contradict. It might be both. It might be something else entirely. Any way you slice it, you’re frustrated, and you’re ready to just throw up your hands and say “To the pits with all of it!” and that’s what you might think of as “surrender.”

That’s not surrender.

It is not surrender to up and quit. It is not surrender to throw away the desires of your heart. To do so is to deny the gifts God wants to give to you. To do so is to say to God, “I know better than you what I want, and this ain’t it.” If you’ve ever done that, did you notice that there was peace in doing that? Probably not. You’ve probably spent days, weeks, months, maybe even years ruminating on it.

Surrender is not “giving up,” but rather “giving over.” That comes first with humility, the skill to recognize that God is God and I am not, and there’s only so much I can do. The rest is placed in God’s hands – not destroyed, not discarded, but given to God as a gift and invitation.

And the second requirement for real surrender is hope. There’s another theological word that we don’t always use correctly. When you say “I sure hope you’re right,” you’re not really expressing hope. Kind of the opposite, actually; you’re expressing that you want things to turn out one way, but you don’t fully trust it will. That’s not hope. Hope is a full belief in God’s goodness, and a full trust that He is who He says He is and will always keep His word. G.K. Chesterton wrote that “angels can fly because they take themselves lightly.” It’s the virtue of hope that frees us up enough to not take ourselves so seriously and be open to God working in our lives, even at our worst.

But you cannot give God a truly open invitation if you have no hope, no trust that He will come through. You’ll either believe that everything is riding on you alone and refuse to loosen your grip, or you’ll believe that nothing you do matters in the slightest and you refuse to participate. And sometimes it can lead to both at once, which is confusing and incomparably crushing.

If you hold on too tightly, He can’t put His hands on it. But if you don’t hold on at all, He can’t put your hands where they need to be.

Those people I’ve known over the years who take themselves lightly, and hold onto their expectations and plans lightly, experience the blessing of Jesus’ peace and his joy. Those who take themselves seriously, and hold onto their expectations and plans tightly (or not at all), experience anxiety and angst.

St. Thérèse often wrote of how she surrendered herself to Jesus so He would take her up to Himself in His lift. In that context I want to offer this admonition to my friends who suffer from anxiety:

Surrender yourself to Jesus and take yourself lightly. The lighter you become, the easier it is for Him to lift you up out of your anxiety, and into His peace.

Notes:

Thérèse of Lisieux, The Little Way: Reflections on the Joy of Smallness in God’s Infinite Love, Whitaker House, April 4, 2023

Wikipedia contributors. (2026, July 8). Thérèse of Lisieux. In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 21:06, July 13, 2026, from Thérèse of Lisieux, Wikipedia