Retreat and Surrender... to God's Will and Loving Arms

“No Retreat, No Surrender”

That was the title of a popular martial arts movie in the 1980s. And a lot of times, we just want to power through life without pause and without rest, without retreating and without surrendering. It’s a relentlessly restless world driving us tired, weary, thirsty, and constantly longing for something more. The silence and serenity of a retreat can create for us an environment where we can be intentional in finding the kind of deep rest and relaxation that our soul sorely needs. Retreats have a way of signaling to our brain that we are about to break out of the mundane and the routine and enter into something different, something special, something extraordinary, something sacred. And we surrender to it.

God’s loving arms are always open, always inviting us in, but it’s an invitation that we must decidedly accept and enter into with intention. There are too many distractions swaying us in different directions, and we often allow ourselves to get mindlessly carried farther away from God’s invitation.

As Saint Augustine said, “Our hearts are restless until they rest in God.” Whether we learn to recognize it or not, we have a deep longing for the kind of peace and respite that we find only in the loving arms of God. There is a deep sense of peace and comfort when we relinquish control and just surrender to the will of God, completely trusting that all will be well. Julian Norwich spent 15 years meditating on the meaning of that line that she became famous for, “All will be well.” She went on a spiritual quest, trying to answer how it can be that all will be well. The answer she found, as revealed to her, was love. For love and by love.

“But all will be well, and all will be well, and every kind of thing will be well.” – Julian of Norwich

The raging river of life carries us in a way that renders us helpless and hopeless. We sometimes need to just pause with intention, get off the raging river, and retreat. A retreat can serve as a turning point in our lives where we can reexamine our journey, examine the unexamined, reassess our values, and ensure that the direction of our lives is in alignment with the will of God. Just as our cell phones and laptops need resetting in order to apply some software changes, we also need to power off, reset, and then restart so that we can apply the necessary changes. The files and folders of our lives get easily filled with junk that sometimes we just need to declutter, empty out the folders, and hit the reset button. It’s hard to receive grace when one’s cup is full.

The silence and solitude of a retreat beckon us to empty out our cup and allow God to fill it with his refreshing grace, with his love. You, God, are my God, earnestly I seek you; I thirst for you, my whole being longs for you, in a dry and parched land where there is no water. (Ps. 63:1)