Surrendering Our Restlessness to God

Let’s face it, we’re restless.

This restlessness starts young. Every infant I’ve ever seen fidgets. This restlessness continues throughout childhood. Most children never walk; they always seem to be trotting, skipping or running.

This restlessness doesn’t stop as people get older.

Young adults jump from one job to another like they’re on trampolines. Picture overcaffeinated jackhammers, and that's what many people's legs look like underneath conference room tables during meetings.

If subtitles of people’s thoughts were projected above their heads during conversations, their interior musings would look like multiple pinballs swirling in their brains, pinging around various ideas, anxieties, things they need to do next, stuff they forgot.

Restlessness also extends to prayer time. I dare you to pray the rosary and not feel distracted by thoughts rising in your head like dozens of red balloons soaring into the air.

Put a TV remote in someone’s hands – men are legendary for the following skill – and soon all you hear is click…. click… click. That’s the sound of the channel being changed – again and again and again.

Restless.

We’re all so restless.

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One of the good things I have found about getting older is learning to slow down – and with it, finally realizing how restless I have been in my life. Being restless means having a lot of energy and not knowing what to do with it.

As I age, I realize I have less energy. If you have ever watched great athletes as they have gotten older, you understand that they realize that the explosiveness they had when they were younger – imagine Michael Jordan soaring to the basket when he was in college – is not available to them like it used to be.

Michael Jordan in his 30s was not the same star he was when he was younger. In his 30s, he learned to stick a dagger in you, not through his iconic slashing and soaring drives to the hoop, but by stepping back and swishing baskets from beyond the three-point line. He learned to conserve and harness his energy, becoming more focused in maximizing his talents, rather than relying on the rawness of them.

Now that I realize that restless energy is wasted energy, I have learned that part of the process of how I surrender to the Lord is learning how to channel my energy. And my channeling becomes my focus, and my focus is to surrender.

To surrender is a quest on what is most important in my life. And that is to seek first the Kingdom of God. The way I do that is to accept His will in all matters, and that all starts with getting to know Jesus and growing in intimacy with Him through constant prayer.

“Very often we have heard that Christianity is not merely a doctrine, nor a way of behaving, nor a culture,” Pope Francis said in April 2020. “Yes, it is all this, but it is first and foremost an encounter. A person is Christian because he or she has encountered Jesus Christ, has let him or herself be encountered by Him.”

Pope Francis continued: “…We are born with a seed of restlessness. God wants it thus: the restlessness of finding fullness, restlessness of finding God, very often always without knowing that we have this restlessness. Our hearts are restless, our hearts are thirsty: thirsty for the encounter with God. Our hearts seek Him, many times on the wrong paths: it gets lost, then it returns, it seeks Him… On the other hand, God thirsts for the encounter to the point that He sent Jesus to meet us, to come towards this restlessness.”

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In understanding my restlessness, I found that it led to sinfulness. I allowed a lot of my restless energy for sin, for things of this world. I was thirsty, but was drinking from contaminated water.

In conserving my energy, and learning how to surrender it to the Lord, I have learned to concentrate it. In concentrating it, my aim is to drink from the well that Jesus offers us – the one that is mentioned in the famous Gospel passage from John 4:9-14.

The Samaritan woman said to Him, “How can you, a Jew, ask me, a Samaritan woman, for a drink?” (For Jews use nothing in common with Samaritans.)

Jesus answered and said to her, “If you knew the gift of God and who is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked Him, and He would have given you living water.”

[The woman] said to Him, “Sir, you do not even have a bucket and the well is deep; where then can you get this living water? Are you greater than our father Jacob, who gave us this well and drank from it himself with his children and his flocks?”

Jesus answered and said to her, “Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I shall give will never thirst; the water I shall give will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”

To discover this well, you have to encounter Christ. How can that encounter occur? Jesus says it is simple: be open to approach Him and ask to drink from the well of the “living water” that He offers.

In other words, be trusting and vulnerable enough to go to Him. Be open to love Him and be loved by Him. All this requires focus. Be sure that the distractions of the world will try their best to make you lose that focus, which is the very opposite of surrender.

So the next time you’re feeling restless – which is another way of saying that you are feeling filled with longing for the eternal – know that Jesus is waiting for you. Train yourself to redirect your restless energy on prayer. Learn to desire Him in your prayer.

“Desire is your prayer; and if your desire is without ceasing, your prayer will also be without ceasing,” St. Augustine said. “The continuance of your longing is the continuance of your prayer.”

Prayer is the conversation that begins, and continues, this encounter with Him. Prayer is what keeps us focused on what is True, Good and Beautiful and detaches us from what is false, selfish and disordered. Prayer helps us to fulfill our thirst because we meet the eternal God in Whom we turn to in our prayers.

“So, brethren, let us long, because we are to be filled,” St. Augustine said. “That is our life, to be trained by longing, and our training through the holy longing advances in the measure that our longings are detached from the love of this world.”