An Invitation to Let Go of Control

The stars are always brighter when you drive up into the Rocky Mountains. But one night during the first week of my final year in college, I didn’t make the drive joyfully. I was frustrated.

Instead of going back to Costa Rica that summer, I’d decided to intern at a ministry called the Annex, a college ministry that had been playing a pivotal role in my faith journey.

My focus had been asking God to move in a powerful way in the fall. We wanted the first service of the new school year to be the beginning of a move of God. We wanted God to shake the auditorium and fill us with his Spirit like he had for the disciples in Acts. We wanted revival to break out on our campus.

Revival is a word we use to describe moments in history when the work of God seems to accelerate exponentially. There have been multiple monumental moments over the last two millennia—and as the new school year drew near, we spent the summer praying it would happen again.

We gathered a group of people to pray every Wednesday on Farrand Field. Every week, we prayed that the first Annex of the new school year would be different.

Then the fall finally came and, with it, the first service we’d spent so much time praying for. Students showed up. We sang. We heard a message. And people laughed and hugged as they caught up with friends in the lobby.

I didn’t stick around for all of that.

I left, furious and frustrated.

I wanted more.

More people.

More tears.

More salvations.

More goosebumps.

I wanted it so badly that I drove up a mountain to voice my annoyances to God. I reminded him of all those Wednesdays we’d sacrificed out in that field praying. I reminded him of the numbers I’d asked for, a quota we hadn’t hit.

I was exhausted.

I was angry.

And Jesus’s offer, “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest,” sounded too good to be true.

Because I thought I’d done that, but apparently it hadn’t worked. Instead of getting rest, I just got a heavier burden that made me even more weary.

Fifteen years later, that memory still makes me cringe. I have enough perspective to see how much of a control issue I had (and probably still have) in spiritual moments like those. That night and that first service should have been all about God, but I found a way to make it about me.

At one level, my cry for revival was pure.

But then there was an uglier layer beneath it.

I was looking for an emotive experience.

I was hoping for tears.

I didn’t just want the night to ignite a revival in our city; I wanted reporters to write articles and historians to write books about how it was all sparked because a few college kids had the faith to pray every Wednesday for a whole summer. In other words, I wanted it to be about me. And I wanted it to be done on my timetable. All the prayers were simply my way of trying to control the outcome.

The better prayer that night in the mountains would’ve been, Lord, free me from me. 

If you resonate with any of this and if Jesus’s invitation, “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest,” sounds like an empty promise to you, there’s a good chance control is the thing standing in the way. It could be that the frustration and disappointment are highlighting a way you are still trying to tell God what to do, instead of the other way around.

You likely have your own version of how you try to control your spiritual journey.

If I could speak to my younger self, I’d remind him that the soul rest that Jesus talked about is possible but that Jesus began that famous teaching with three essential words: “Come to me.” This radical invitation calls us to stop trying to control outcomes and focus more on surrender and trust. Because as image bearers, we get to play a pivotal part in this unfolding narrative God is telling. So much of which is above our pay grade.

The truth is, that service at the Annex was incredible. I’ve had conversations with two friends I respect deeply who say that night was a massive turning point for them. Which means, when I was up in the mountains shouting at God for not moving, they were telling their friends all about how God was moving. That’s about as humbling a realization as you can get.

I couldn’t see it.

Because I was trying to control it.

Sometimes breakthrough does come, but other days it doesn’t. Pray for it and pursue it with shameless audacity; but practice letting go of control at the same time. Because the day you learn to surrender the outcome—and I mean really surrender (as in, still being content even when it doesn’t go the way you hoped)—those walls of your me-maze will start coming down.

 

Adapted from Free Me From Me by Ryan Wekenman. Copyright © 2026 by Ryan Wekenman. Published by WaterBrook, an imprint of the Penguin Random House Christian Publishing Group. Used by permission. Ryan Wekenman is the teaching pastor of Red Rocks Austin. Tune in to hear him this Thursday, Nov. 19, on LIFE Today.