This is my baby rubber plant. It doesn’t look so much like a baby anymore, does it? Over the years, I noticed the more it grew, the more it began to lean over. This used to really frustrate me, and I kept trying to get it to stand upright. Finally, I surrendered, and when I surrendered, I realized something. The plant wasn’t meant to stay upright; it had outgrown that shape, and now it’s new shape was free-flowing, cascading out of the pot. Once I gave up on trying to make it stand straight up, I began to notice how beautiful it really was, more beautiful than it had ever been before.

What mold(s) are you trying to fit into? Is it working? If your answer is no, then have you considered that maybe you’ve simply out grown it? Or maybe you never fit into it to begin with. Many times in my life I’ve found myself trying to fit into things, places, even people I was never meant to.

I’ve learned one of the greatest gifts we can give to ourselves is the gift of surrender. It’s not the inability to fit where we don’t belong that causes us pain; it is our resistance to it, our inability to surrender that thing. When we stop fighting for what isn’t ours, we can go where God leads; we can go where we grow.

Just as I fought with my baby rubber to stand upright, we fight with ourselves to do things we were never meant to. It’s in the surrender, we are able to see our true form, our true beauty as we become the shape that God designed us to be.