On the hard days the move is not to push harder. It is to let go.
This pillar is the hardest one to write, and it should be. Who said God was supposed to be simple? I was born into an old-fashioned Christian family, so faith came to me first as an inheritance. But here is the distinction I have come to believe matters most. Religion has not always been a good thing in my eyes. God and Jesus always have.
My honest opinion is that a lot of religion was built to control people and to take their power away. Study the Bible closely and something different comes through. We are sons of God. Not small, powerless people scraping by, but carriers of something far bigger. The Holy Spirit lives in us.
"Faith gave me power. Religion, too often, was designed to take it."
The reason I still believe is that my parents never forced it on me. I have seen up close what forcing does. In Finland there are strict religious communities where faith becomes a cult, where children are made to follow the rules, and predictably many of them grow up to reject everything connected to it. Not always God himself, but the religion that bruised them. My relationship with God and Jesus today feels healthy. I know and feel that they are present in my life, constantly.
The hardest instruction in the whole Bible, for me, is a simple one. Give your worries to me. I have struggled to live that fully. Some part of me still wants to hold the wheel of my own life with both hands. And the strange thing I keep noticing is that the harder I try to control everything, the more the setbacks seem to pile up.
There is a line about the birds. They do not worry about what they will eat today. They do not sit around anxious about it. They simply know. They trust they will find the seed. And then the question lands on you: do you really think you, of all things, will not be taken care of?
My life has been anything but smooth. Through all of it, the one thing that has never failed me is the ability to put my hands together and ask God for help. That is not weakness. Surrender is not weakness. It is the opposite. It is trusting that the story is bigger than what you can see on any given Tuesday.
Why would I not share this? If this idea, this whole thing I am building, came to me from God and Jesus, then staying quiet about it would be the strange choice, not speaking about it.
How to find God and how to find Jesus both start in the same place: letting go of control. People overthink it badly. They tell themselves they do not know how to pray, that they are not allowed to pray, that they would do it wrong. None of that is the point.
You do not actually need to find God or Jesus, because they already are and always will be. What you need to do is give your life to them and let the Holy Spirit in, so that the reason you are here can actually come true. I had a slightly childlike thought as a kid that has never left me. If the message of the Bible is true, then is it not insane not to believe it? If Jesus really is the way to eternal life, what exactly is the safe bet in refusing that? What if it is true?
Spend ten minutes today in a quiet practice. Prayer, stillness, breath, or a walk with no destination. No phone. No agenda. Before you finish, name three things you are genuinely grateful for.
Then look at one thing in your life you are trying to control that is not actually yours to control. Notice the grip. Practice loosening it, just slightly, just for today.
You do not have to have it all figured out. You just have to stop pretending the weight was ever meant to be carried alone.