Blog #16: What You Can't Control — and What That Reveals

Category: Reflection · 5 min read

The list of things outside your control is longer than you want to admit. What you do with that list is one of the most spiritual decisions you will ever make.

Let me say it plainly for a moment.

You cannot control whether your child makes the decision you think they should make. You cannot control your aging parent's memory, or the pace of its loss, or how your siblings handle it. You cannot control the election. You cannot control what your coworker says in a meeting, or what your boss decides about your role, or whether the company survives the year.

You cannot control the traffic on your morning commute. You cannot control your spouse's mood when they walk in the door. You cannot control whether your friend calls back. You cannot control what people think of you. You cannot control whether the diagnosis is what you hoped.

You cannot control the weather. You cannot control the economy. You cannot control the news cycle that is shaping the childhood of the children you love. You cannot control who gets sick and who recovers and who doesn't. You cannot control the timing of grief.

You can feel the weight of that list even reading it.

And I want you to notice something: you have been treating a great deal of that list as if it were yours to manage anyway.

This is where I want to slow down, because I think it is the honest heart of this post.

You know, intellectually, that those things are outside your control. You would say so if someone asked you. But your body has been operating as if they were yours to carry anyway. The lying awake at night rehearsing a conversation you have not yet had. The refreshing of the news. The mental energy spent on your adult child's decisions. The constant low-grade bracing for the next thing that might go wrong.

That is the cost of the illusion. And the cost is enormous.

It costs you sleep. It costs you presence with the people actually in the room. It costs you the ability to enjoy good things when they arrive, because you are already scanning the horizon for the next threat. It costs you joy, which cannot coexist with sustained vigilance. It costs you trust, which cannot grow in the soil of constant management.

And underneath all of that, quietly, it costs you your sense of God. Because a person who believes the world is theirs to hold has no room, functionally, for a God who is holding it. You may still say you believe. You may still mean it. But your nervous system has been operating on a different theology than your mouth has been confessing.

The gap between what you say you believe and what your body is doing at 2am — that gap is the real cost.

Here is what I want to offer, carefully.

The list is not your enemy. The list is your teacher.

Every item on the list of things you cannot control is, in a strange way, a small act of mercy. Because every one of them is a reminder that you were not designed to carry the world. You were designed to carry what is yours. That list is much shorter. It is usually the one right in front of you — the next conversation, the next decision, the next meal, the next breath.

You have been operating as if your list and God's list were the same list. They are not. And every time reality reminds you that they are not, it is not a punishment. It is a correction toward your actual size.

Your actual size is smaller than you have been acting. And smaller is not less. Smaller is freer.

Consider for a moment what it would mean to read that list again — the child, the parent, the election, the traffic, the mood — and let each item simply not be yours.

Not in a detached way. Not in a way that says you do not care. You care enormously. That is not the question. The question is whether your care is expressed through management or through trust.

Management says, I will carry this because if I don't, no one will.

Trust says, I will do what is actually mine to do, and I will release the rest to the One whose list it actually is.

Management is exhausting. Trust is restful — not because the situation is easier, but because you are no longer doing a job that was never yours.

The list is teaching you something. It has been teaching you for years.

It is teaching you the difference between your work and God's work. It is teaching you that the sense of control you have been grasping was never real — and that letting it go does not make the world more dangerous. The world was already that way. You were just pretending otherwise.

And it is teaching you, slowly, that the God you have been asking to help you manage is actually asking you to stop managing. Not to stop caring. To stop carrying what is not yours to carry.

That lesson will take a lifetime to learn. You will not graduate from it. Neither will I. But we can start today, with the list, and with the quiet decision to let each item be what it is.

Not mine. His.

And you — lighter, smaller, freer — finally allowed to do only your part.

If something here resonated with you, The Direction Series was written for exactly where you are. I would love to invite you in — you can find it at directionseries.com.

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