Surrendering is intentionally laying down the power I possess. And have I considered that the power I lay down is often more powerful than that which I’m laying it down in front of? Therefore, I would be wise to recognize that surrender is less the absence of power and more the presence of fear.

Although I too often see myself as powerless, the fact is the New Year is what I make it. And whatever I make it is what it makes me.

Let us not fall prey to the leaching negativity and rank pessimism that runs unleashed all around us. Rather, with the utmost determination we must bring ourselves to understand that these lies have been given legitimacy by people who thought themselves as powerless in the face of them, rather than recognizing that we have the power to rip the face off of them.

Maybe the greatest power of all is the power of restraint.

Thankfulness is a lethal weapon of unimaginable power. And because it is, it allows us to rise far above all of the dark and maniacal forces that assail us. And in refusing to lower ourselves to the squalid terrain from which these forces have launched their sordid attacks they are doomed to surrender, not because we outwitted them in battle, but because we stole the battle.

Pausing and scanning the landscape for a moment, he turned back to little David and with a subdued voice said, “You just have to have hope in something bigger than people, that’s all. You have to have hope in something that’s so big that if everything you’ve got is taken from you, you’ll always have more than what was taken.

Some of the very things that we so desperately need are hidden in plain sight because we can’t understand how something so plain can contain something so powerful. But is that not the way that God most often shows up?

I get so caught up in praying for a way ‘around’ things that I completely miss the fact that God has already ‘removed’ those things. And it is then that I realize that I had imposed my weakness on God’s strength.

What is fear but that ‘thing’ that we believed to be as powerful as it pretended to be.