The 2,500-Year-Old Answer to "Let Go and Let God"

I used to struggle with the concept of God having a plan for me. As young as 12 or 13, I remember the unsettling feeling in my stomach when I was reminded of Bible verses like these (all NIV):

Everyone around me seemed comforted by the idea that God had a plan for their lives. But I did not want to surrender to someone else’s plan, not even God’s. I wanted control over my life.

You do not need to have grown up in a high-control religious environment to know that feeling. Anyone who has lain awake wondering whether free will is real can understand. It is the suspicion that your life might be running on rails somebody else, or even just biology and physics, had laid down.

After I left high-control religion, I spent a lot of time working on my sense of control. And according to the research, having a sense of control over your life turns out to be extremely important. It is one of the strongest predictors of success in health and career and school. But we all know it’s not that simple. There are a lot of things that are out of our control. Most things are out of our control. So how do we approach those things? And how do we know what, if anything, is within our control?

Growing up in church I remember learning that I had free will, which is why I was automatically going to hell unless I did something about it, and somehow that was God loving me, because he gave me choice. But He also had a plan for my life; it was just up to me to follow that plan. But also, ultimately, God’s plan would prevail? Maybe not? I don’t know. It was all very confusing.

It turns out these are three separate beliefs. Whether you believe your choices are real is one belief, which philosophers call “free will.” Most Christians believe we have this. Whether you believe the future is already written, called fatalistic determinism, is another. Many Christians believe this too. And whether you expect the outcomes of your life to follow from your own actions, rather than from luck, fate, or powerful others, is a third thing entirely. That is locus of control. If you expect your actions to matter, your locus is internal. If you expect your life to be decided by forces outside you, it is external.

Most Christians would push back on this one. Look at any sports star after a big win: they will tell you it was God, not them. Or ask the woman who found the parking spot right in front of the store: she’ll say it was a blessing from God. Or the recent viral TikTok moment of the girl who swears God was filling up her conditioner bottle because she asked Him to. All of this is fine, and harmless, until it is not. Because why does God bless some and not others? If God is refilling conditioner bottles, where was He for the family in the ICU down the road, praying harder than anyone? And is it not okay to say the sports star won because they worked hard?

Across decades of research, people with a stronger internal locus of control tend to do better on a long list of outcomes: they take more health-protective actions, persist longer at hard things, achieve more in school and work, and report less depression and anxiety. Most of this evidence is correlational. Still, the overall pattern is that expecting your actions to matter is good for you. And life often pushes back the other way: hardship you cannot control can make anyone’s locus drift outward.

Because you do not control the diagnosis, the layoff, the other driver, the weather, other people, or the past. A strong internal locus of control is healthy right up to the boundary of what is actually yours. Past that boundary, it turns into something less healthy: trying to control things that cannot be controlled. Some of the hardest seasons of my life were the ones I spent trying to control exactly those things. Which brings me back to the question: how do we approach the things that are out of our control? Because the type of surrender that was asked of me as a kid doesn’t feel right.

I was taught to “let go.” To “let go and let God.” You see my problem.

The surrender I was taught ran around me. Lean not on your own understanding, distrust your gut, override your instincts, and defer to a plan you never get to know. Psychologists Pargament and colleagues call this deferring: you hand the problem to God and go passive. Or some will even make decisions that go against their own desires, because they were taught that desires are “of the world.” It sits in contrast to a collaborative style, working alongside whatever you take the sacred to be, with your own agency fully switched on. Study after study finds the collaborative style is the one associated with better outcomes.

The trust I practice now runs through me. My mind is a prediction machine. I have written a whole essay on this.

My prediction machine has been trained on every moment I have lived, and it speaks to me through my body and my gut, telling me what is right for me and what is not. When I trust the flow of things now, that is the instrument doing the trusting. I check it, I feed it new information, and I know its biases. But I no longer treat it as the enemy of faithfulness. Growing up, I was taught that anxiety was the devil at work in me, that a bad feeling in my body was temptation rather than information. I know now it was often the opposite. That it was my own instrument, trying to tell me something.

So I have not stopped surrendering. I’ve changed what I surrender to, and I do it without going passive. In Taoism there is a really beautiful metaphor I like: you are a raft in a flowing river. I move with the current as life unfolds, but I have my own paddles too. Taoism calls this approach wu-wei, usually translated “non-action” or “effortless action.” To practice wu-wei does not mean total passivity. It means steering with the natural current instead of fighting it, using the power of the river rather than opposing it. For me, life gets hard when I catch myself paddling against the flow. I trust my body to tell me when I am doing it, and I adjust my steering in response. It is, as one of my favorite prayers puts it, “the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.”

Before I left high-control religion, I was afraid that God’s plan was not going to align with my desires. In my next phase of life I went full force into new age mysticism, and ironically, I became obsessed with finding my path, because I wanted to make sure I was going to learn the lessons I needed in this life. Today, I believe that the lessons I need to learn are so universal that any path can reveal them to me. And on the days my skepticism subsides, I catch myself believing that God’s plan, if there is one for me, would be greater than my plan for myself. That is the feeling I get when I feel in flow. It is that trust, though I do not know where it comes from, that doors close for a reason and better ones are opening up.

I look around at my beautiful life and I see blessings: a healthy daughter, a loving husband, a career I love, and most recently, the audience I have found here. I am so grateful for it all. I am so grateful for my life. If there is a God, I want to thank them for it. But I also recognize that I worked hard for many of those things. And the things that are out of my control? I think they just are the way they are, because that is the way it is. It’s not luck or faith. It is, again, this dance between taking control of what I can and surrendering what I can’t.

I do still grapple with the idea that God’s plan is good, that God is good. Bad things happen, tragedies with no lesson in them, and I find it hard to look at some of the horrific things happening in the world and say God is good the way I was taught to. The most I can say is God just is. God is Being itself, not a large man with a white beard.

And if that is what there is, then that leaves me leaning toward the idea that Being is good, because here we are, experiencing life, and life is tragic and also beautiful, and I would take this tragic and beautiful journey over nothingness any day. Some mornings that is my entire theology.

In philosophical Taoism, there is no god and there is no plan, no moral good and no evil. The Tao is the river: it is just the way things flow. It just is. Other days, that is my theology. In the Taoist picture, the raft we ride is made of our rigid beliefs, our rules, our ego, and as you grow wiser, you begin to let pieces of it go. I begin to feel this in moments when my grip on control loosens and I trust the flow more than my plans. In the highest state of Taoist awareness, the boundary between “you” and the universe dissolves. You are not a separate entity fighting or riding the water. You are the water. Your breath is the wind, your body is the earth, and your life is the flow of the Tao. When you embody this, there is no more raft, no more traveler, and no more danger, only the eternal, natural flow. Guys, I’m not there yet.

With all I grapple with, with all my uncertainty, I cannot explain why, but I believe that everything is going to be okay. Of course, I cannot prove the everything. But I am learning to surrender to the flow.

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Sources:

locus of control (Rotter, 1966); free will (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy); fatalistic determinism as measured by the FAD-Plus scale (Paulhus & Carey, 2011); locus of control and work outcomes (Ng, Sorensen & Eby, 2006); locus of control and depression/anxiety symptoms (Cheng et al., 2013); uncontrollable stress and learned helplessness (Maier & Seligman, 2016); religious coping styles (Pargament, overview); religious coping and adjustment, meta-analysis (Ano & Vasconcelles, 2005); wu-wei (Britannica); Daoism (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy); the Daodejing (Legge translation, MIT Classics); Zhuangzi (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy); the Serenity Prayer (Niebuhr); Proverbs 19:21, Jeremiah 29:11, Proverbs 3:5-6, and 1 John 2:15-17 (NIV).*