For most of my Christian life, one phrase never made much sense to me.
“Hand it over to God.”
I never doubted the sincerity of the people who said it. I just never understood what they meant. How do you hand something you cannot hold to Someone you cannot see? Was I supposed to stop thinking about it? Stop feeling it? Pretend it no longer hurt or haunted me?
So I usually nodded, thanked them, and quietly wondered if everyone else knew a secret I had somehow missed.
Then life gave me something I couldn’t carry.
Someone close to me wounded me deeply. It wasn’t one dramatic moment. It was a pattern that slowly spread into other parts of my life and began affecting people I loved. I replayed conversations, imagined future ones, defended myself in my head, and carried the weight everywhere I went.
I prayed constantly.
If I’m honest, most of those prayers were really instructions.
“Lord, fix this. Change them. Make this stop. Make me feel better.”
I thought I was surrendering. Looking back, I was still trying to manage the outcome.
Eventually I made the painful decision to step back. It felt like failure. I questioned myself constantly. I wondered if I was abandoning someone. I wondered whether a faithful Christian was supposed to keep enduring no matter the cost.
Then one realization changed everything.
I realized not only that I didn’t deserve to keep hurting anymore.
I realized I didn’t have to.
That felt almost wrong to admit. Somewhere along the way I had convinced myself that continuing to carry the pain was somehow more faithful. As though suffering itself proved my obedience.
The more I prayed, the more I began to see something uncomfortable.
I had added a command God never gave.
I thought of Eve in the garden. When the serpent questioned her, she replied that they were not even supposed to touch the tree. But God had only said not to eat from it. Somewhere, somehow, something had been added.
I realized I had done something similar.
God calls us to forgive. He calls us to love. He calls us to trust Him.
He never told me I had to keep carrying a burden He had invited me to give to Him.
That was when the phrase “hand it over to God” finally became real.
I still didn’t know how, so I did the only thing I could think of.
In prayer, I imagined gathering every hurt, every fear, every unanswered question, every memory, and placing them into a box.
I closed the lid.
I handed the box to God.
“Lord, this is too heavy for me. I can’t carry it anymore. It belongs to You now.”
For a while, I felt lighter.
The next day the thoughts came back.
Then it hit me.
I had quietly picked the box back up.
So I prayed, “Lord, I don’t know why but I seem to have picked this back up. Here. It belongs to you,” and I handed it back.
The next day I picked it up again.
So I handed it back again.
That became my prayer for days, then weeks.
Over time the circumstances didn’t change nearly as much as I wanted.
But I did.
The rehearsing slowed. The bitterness lost its grip. The grief remained, but it no longer ruled me. I wasn’t pretending the hurt never happened. I simply wasn’t carrying it by myself anymore.
I finally understood that handing something to God isn’t asking Him to do what I want.
It’s releasing my claim to control what only He can carry.
Sometimes I still find myself reaching for that box.
When I notice it, I don’t shame myself.
I simply smile, hand it back, and remember that my Father never asked me to carry it in the first place.
That’s what surrender has become for me.
Not a single moment.
A daily decision to trust the One who is strong enough to carry what I never could.