What We Think We Control—and What Is Truly Ours

For most of my life, I believed control was something we were meant to learn.

Manage your emotions.

Shape your future.

Choose wisely.

Stay ahead.

But life has a way of dismantling that belief—not all at once, but piece by piece—until you are left standing with empty hands and a deeper truth.

I no longer believe we control much of anything.

Not the timing of events.

Not the turns our lives take.

Not the people who stay or leave.

Not the body when it falters.

Not even the emotions that rise inside us, uninvited and unannounced.

Even the present moment arrives already formed.

Already carrying its weight, its beauty, its ache.

We don’t summon it.

We meet it.

So when people say, “At least you can control this moment,” I pause.

Because even this moment brings with it feelings that come with this moment —grief, peace, fear, longing, relief, happiness. They move through us like weather. We do not command them. We experience them.

And yet—there is something that has never left me.

Something untouched by circumstance, opinion, loss, or fear.

My faith.

Faith is not control.

Faith is not certainty.

Faith is not the absence of doubt.

Faith is belonging.

It is the one thing that is truly mine—not because I claimed it, but because God gave it. And what God gives in this way cannot be taken by anyone else.

Not by courts.

Not by illness.

Not by misunderstanding.

Not by seasons that feel unbearably long.

Faith does not promise that things will unfold as I had planned.

It promises that I am not alone as they unfold.

It is not shaken when life rearranges itself.

It does not require me to explain myself.

It does not leave when I am unsure.

Faith stays.

I have learned that when control collapses, faith does not rush in to fix anything. It simply remains—steady, quiet, present. It asks me not to master life, but to trust the One who holds it.

And perhaps that is the deeper truth:

We do not control life.

We consent to live it.

We place ourselves inside its current.

We feel what is true.

We release what is not ours to hold.

And what remains—what has always remained—is faith.

Faith is mine.

And God said so.