The Shape of Surrender
I love flowers! 💐🪻🌷🌼🌻☺️☺️☺️
Tulips are my husband’s favorite. So when he buys them for me, it’s a quiet win for us both—him offering what he loves, me receiving what I cherish.
One bouquet caught my eye as the morning light poured in.
The tulips had bent so gracefully toward the window, their stems stretched and their petals opened wide.
No forcing.
No striving.
Just responding to the light.
I tried to rotate the vase to help them “straighten up.” I thought they’d realign if I just turned them in a different direction. But they didn’t. They kept their posture, curved as if still remembering the light they were first drawn to.
And it made me wonder…
What if we lived like that?
What if we embraced the bend—not as weakness, but as surrender? Not as resistance, but as trust?
What if our hearts stayed curved toward the will of God, even when life spun us in circles?
To remain bent in the direction of His presence…
That’s not just obedience.
That’s surrender!
Great story, right?!? That was enough to give us all pause. But, we all know that God’s lessons sometimes come in series. Insert Part II…
Just before Mother’s Day, hubby bought another bouquet of tulips. They too began bending toward the window. But this time, I was determined to keep them upright—rotating the vase daily, trying to manage their shape.
Until the petals fell.
One by one, they dropped to the table like a quiet rebellion.
Confused, I texted my husband, especially because he and the kids had been playing board games at the table the night before. I was ready to go all in:
“What happened to my flowers?” (insert attitude that can’t be determined in text)
His response:
“They started falling off yesterday. It looked as if the petals just jumped off the stem.”
And just like that…revelation. 😲
Maybe that’s what happens when we try to adjust what God has already aligned.
Maybe we don’t just lose beauty — we lose strength.
We lose sustainability.
We. Fall. Apart.
Each time I turned that vase, I thought I was helping. I was actually disrupting the connection between the stem and the source. The bend wasn’t something to fix. It was something to honor.
There’s a cost to our resistance.
When we try to force ourselves or others into a posture that looks “better” or feels more “appropriate”, we might end up severing the very thing that was keeping us alive:
The surrender.
The design.
The quiet obedience to light.
Sometime what looks like falling apart is actually the result of trying too hard to hold it together our way. Can I get a witness? 🙌🏾
Here’s the truth:
The source doesn’t pivot toward us.
We are designed to pivot toward it.
And surrender?
It’s not a dramatic fall.
It’s a daily bend.
One that quietly whispers: “I don’t have to understand it. I’ll stay here anyway.”
So, here’s some advice that I’m working to follow each day:
Let the world turn.
Let life shift.
Stay in the shape He formed.
Where in your life is God asking you to surrender, not control?
Where might He be calling you to stay bent, even if it doesn’t feel comfortable?
Send out Your light and Your truth;
Let them lead me;
Let them bring me to Your holy hill and to Your dwelling
-Psalm 43:3 (ESV)