This week I had to take my car into the shop. It wasn’t anything catastrophic, but she’s an older car now with a lot of miles on her. A lot of miles. Every time I bring her in, the technicians give me a smile and say something along the lines of, “It’s unusual to see this model of car with so many miles on it.” Yes, I know. But that’s my car, and she’s been faithful.
When a car has lived a long life on the road, it needs attention. I take my car in regularly so she can get all the care she needs, oil changes, inspections, and the occasional repair that comes with age. This week it was the usual maintenance, but there was something else that needed attention. The horn had stopped working. Now, a horn might not seem like a big deal, but it matters. A horn is what warns people not to run into you. A horn can save your life. Or at least your bumper.
The problem was that I had absolutely no idea how to fix it. I couldn’t diagnose the root of the problem, and I certainly couldn’t repair it. So I did the only thing I could do. I handed the car over to the people who actually knew what they were doing and left it in their hands. For two days she sat in the shop while the technicians worked on her. Eventually they called to say she was ready. They had fixed the horn, changed the oil, addressed a few other small issues, topped off the windshield wiper fluid, and she was good to go. Once again, she and I were reunited.
As I drove away, it struck me that life with God often works the same way. There are situations where we simply do not have the expertise to fix what’s wrong. We want control. We want solutions. We want to be the ones who figure it out and put everything back together again. But sometimes the situation in front of us is far beyond our ability to repair.
I learned that lesson the hard way years ago when my seven-year-old son was diagnosed with a brain tumor. I remember the stress of those days so clearly. As his surgery approached, the doctor even offered medication to help my son with anxiety. My son wasn’t the one who needed it. His mother was.
Because the truth was, I didn’t have the expertise to fix what was wrong. I didn’t have the knowledge or the skill, and I didn’t even have the ability to influence the outcome. The doctors had to handle the surgery. And even they were not ultimately in control.
In moments like that, you discover something very quickly: there are situations in life where control simply isn’t an option. You are left with only two choices. You can drive yourself crazy with worry, or you can trust God. And when everything else is out of your hands, trusting Him is the only option that leaves room for peace.
We Are Not the Experts in Our Own Problems
One of the things the technician explained to me when I picked up the car was that the horn itself wasn’t really the problem. The horn was just the symptom. The real issue was in the electrical system. Something deeper in the wiring had gone wrong, and that problem happened to show up first through the horn. In other words, what looked like a small issue was actually connected to something much larger that needed attention.
The same thing is often true in our lives.
Sometimes a symptom shows up and that is all we can see. Maybe we feel unusually angry. Maybe we feel stressed, discouraged, or overwhelmed. We can often identify the moment that triggered the feeling, but that doesn’t necessarily mean we understand the real cause. Just like with my car, the thing that appears on the surface is not always the root of the problem.
This can play out in very ordinary situations. Someone might be deeply upset after being passed over for a raise at work. And yes, that can certainly be disappointing. But sometimes the depth of the reaction isn’t really about the raise at all. It may be touching something much deeper, a lifetime of feeling overlooked, dismissed, or rejected.
I have also seen it in small everyday moments. I have watched exhausted mothers in the middle of a grocery store aisle snap at their toddlers. At first glance it might look like the child was simply being terribly difficult. But sometimes the toddler wasn’t the real issue at all. Sometimes mom was simply worn down, running on empty, feeling unseen and unappreciated after carrying the weight of a thousand small responsibilities.
The reaction becomes the visible symptom, but the wiring underneath tells a much deeper story.
I have seen this in my own life as well. I remember a particularly dry season when I found myself praying a very simple prayer: God, I don’t even know why I feel this terrible. It wasn’t one obvious crisis or one clear problem. It was something deeper that I couldn’t immediately explain. And the truth is, it has taken years to slowly unravel those layers.
Sometimes the symptoms show up as questions we quietly carry inside ourselves. Why am I so quick to anger? Why do I struggle to believe that anyone truly loves me? Why do I react so strongly to things that seem small? When those moments appear, it’s easy to turn the blame inward and conclude that we are simply failures. We tell ourselves, I shouldn’t have reacted that way. I shouldn’t have said that. I should be better than this.
But so often those reactions are simply revealing something deeper in the wiring that needs attention and healing. And this is where our limitations become clear. We can usually describe the symptom. We can say, “The horn doesn’t work.” But diagnosing the deeper issue requires a level of knowledge that we simply don’t have.
In the same way, we need a Creator who understands us completely. God knows what is happening within us. He sees the deeper wiring of our hearts, the things we cannot always explain even to ourselves. He also sees the bigger picture of our lives in a way we never will. Sometimes He chooses to reveal parts of that picture to us, and sometimes He doesn’t.
I believe mental health professionals are incredibly important. Therapy has been a meaningful part of my own life, and there have been seasons where medication has helped as well. Those resources matter, and they are gifts that should never be dismissed.
But I have also learned that long-term healing requires my Savior. He knows what is truly going on beneath the surface. He understands the wiring of my heart better than I ever will, and He sees the places that need repair long before the symptoms appear.
Control Is an Illusion
When my son faced brain surgery, everything about that situation was outside of my control. One of the hardest parts, looking back, was the waiting. Cancer is a long game of waiting. You wait for the next appointment, the next scan, the next set of answers. You wait for the phone to ring. You wait for someone to tell you what the next step will be. There is always another stretch of time where you simply have to sit and live with uncertainty.
I remember how desperately I wanted to be busy during those seasons. I wanted to be calling doctors, researching treatments, advocating for my son, doing something, anything, that would make me feel like I was helping move the situation forward. And to be fair, those things are important. I did learn that you should always advocate for your health and ask questions. But at the end of the day, there were limits to what any of us could do.
There came a point where the doctors had done what they could do, and we were left with the reality that the outcome was simply not in our hands. Would surgery work? Would it not? That position of uncertainty did not last for two days, or five days, or even ten days. It lasted for years. Even now, every scan carries a moment where we hold our breath.
Even after walking through something that profound, I cannot pretend that I have fully mastered this lesson. There are still many situations that cause me to worry. I wake up at night worried. I drive home in the car worried. I fill pages of my journal trying to process the worry. Because in my case, and I suspect in many others, worry is often an attempt to reclaim control over something that the mind simply cannot control.
But Jesus asked a question in the Gospel of Matthew that cuts directly to the heart of the matter: “Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life?” The answer, of course, is no. Worry feels active, but it accomplishes nothing. It does not change outcomes. It does not alter the future. It simply consumes the present.
When I step back and really examine the things that trouble me day after day, I realize something humbling: most of them are situations I cannot control at all. Not the outcome. Not the timing. Not the decisions of other people. Not the future.
The only things truly within my control are my actions, my responses, and whether I will choose to release the situation to God. And in the circumstances that cause the greatest anxiety and stress in my life, that is the only control I truly have.
Trust Is the Only Real Option
When we reach the edge of our control, we are left with a choice. We can keep grasping for answers, trying to maintain control over situations that are far beyond our reach. Or we can turn the situation over to the One who truly does have control and trust Him with the outcome. The interesting thing is that whichever path we choose does not actually change how much control we have. We never had control over the outcome in the first place. What it does change is something else entirely, our level of stress, our level of worry, and the peace we carry as we walk through the situation.
Have you ever noticed that God often grows us through a process? It doesn’t seem to be the end result that changes us as much as the journey of getting there. The waiting, the uncertainty, and the moments where we realize we simply cannot manage everything ourselves are often the places where something inside us begins to shift.
It seems to me that God often allows us to walk through situations where we do not have control because He is teaching us to trust Him. At least that has certainly been true in my life. Again and again I have found myself in circumstances where there was nothing I could do to change the outcome, nothing I could manipulate, nothing I could fix. All I could do was bring the situation before God and place it in His hands.
My role is not to fix everything or to understand everything. My role is to remain faithful, to pray, to bring my petitions before Him, and to place the outcomes in the hands of the One who truly does have the knowledge, the wisdom, and the authority over it all.
And over time I have discovered something surprising. Even when the ending is not what I prayed for, the process of walking through it with God has always brought me closer to Him. Every single time.
So often I feel the urge to take control of a situation, to fix something, to solve it, to make it turn out the way I think it should. And yet, God asks something much simpler of me. He asks me to show up. He asks me to love the people in front of me. H calls me to faithfulness in the middle of the situation rather than control over it.
In the end, everything is in His hands. And the more I learn to release my grip on control, the more I discover that His hands are the safest place for it to be.
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