I tried to surrender it all to God and nothing changed. What is wrong with me?

Nothing is wrong with you that is not wrong with every Christian who has ever lived.

You were handed a task no one can complete and then told that the results depended on completing it. That is not your failure. That is a bad instruction, and it has a history — it comes out of a nineteenth-century teaching that made a decisive inward act of surrender the gateway to the victorious life. When the victory does not arrive, that teaching has exactly one explanation available: you must not have really let go. It is unfalsifiable, which means it can accuse you forever, and there is no depth of sincerity that will finally satisfy it.

Notice what it did to you. It sent you looking inside yourself for evidence, and the evidence you were told to look for was the thoroughness of your own release. But you cannot see the bottom of your own heart. Nobody can. Which is precisely why the Spirit does not ordinarily work by giving you a clean readout of your interior — he works through the external Word and the sacraments, so that your assurance sits somewhere you can actually get at it.

You were baptized. That happened to you; you did not achieve it, and you cannot un-achieve it by a poor performance this week. Luther’s weapon against accusation was not surrender harder but a plain past-tense fact: I am baptized.

You can be absolved — spoken to out loud, by name, in the second person, by a man authorized to say it.

And the body and the cup are given for you. Not for those who have finally got their hands open. Everyone at that rail is still holding something. There has never been another kind of communicant.

One more thing, and it is not a small one. If you are fighting an addiction: keep your meeting, keep your sponsor, keep your doctor, and keep taking what you were prescribed. God governs the world through ordinary means, and a phone call at ten at night is not a failure of trust. Anyone who tells you that leaning on those things is evidence of insufficient surrender is doing you real harm.

The picture underneath all of this is not a mutual grip where he holds you and you hold him and everything depends on your fingers. Jesus says his sheep are in his hand and no one can snatch them out. The holding runs one direction, and it always did.

You are not holding on. You are being held.

If you are in crisis, call or text 988 (Suicide & Crisis Lifeline). For substance use help, SAMHSA’s national helpline is 1-800-662-4357, free and available around the clock.