Accepting tenderness and losing control

"As in a human relationship, tenderness involves a continuing and deepening dependence on God.

If the acknowledgment of human contingency is merely theoretical, my illusion of control will endure; if it’s operative, I don’t have to worry anymore about the means of spiritual growth.

All I’ve to do is expose my frailty, my poverty, and my nothingness to what Chesterton called “the furious love of God.” Tenderness is the impeccable sense of feeling safe: it comes from knowing that I’m totally liked and thoroughly loved. If a friend said, “I love you but I don’t like you,” wouldn’t you feel a strong sense of rejection? But God doesn’t make such distinctions; he’s declared himself unreservedly: “Can and mother forget [reject] her infant, be without tenderness for the child of her womb? Even should she forget, I will never forget you” (Isa. 49:15)

Paradoxically, the sense of safety that the acceptance of tenderness engenders is accompanied by a growing loss of control. As we become more comfortable with God’s tenderness, we feel the reins on our life loosening and the stronghold on our autonomous self slipping.

The Napoleonic complex (better Saint Helena than second place) no longer roars so ferociously, clamoring for its absurd demands for perfection to be satisfied. There’s less need to broadcast our established verities or to impose them on others as absolutes. Our viselike grip on the Yamaha handlebar has relaxed. It’s no longer important to endow people we like, possession we treasure, and institutions we value with superlative qualities; we need not glorify either the pastor the future. In the gentle grip of tenderness, we don’t invest ourselves sin any of those things more than is congruent and appropriate to the way they are. We may even give ourselves a B+ occasionally. That’s the sign that self-acceptance is slowly maturing in the wisdom of accepted tenderness..."

- The Wisdom of Tenderness, Manning