Article July 17, 2000 Issue

What do you do with a hot potato?

Don't get burned by it!

By Susan Booth Mack

Recently, I've begun turning to God, not just when I'm up against a wall but as my normal way of dealing with every detail of my experience. It all started one day as I was struggling with a sticky human relationship. I needed to stop trying to solve the problem on my own and to let God take over. And I was trying to do just that. But it felt as if the situation were a hot potato that I was trying to toss to God, thinking, "Here, You take it," but it kept dropping right back into my hands. No matter how hard I tried to yield my will to God's I couldn't seem to do it. Finally, I prayed, "All right, God, You're going to have to show me how to yield, too, along with how to solve the problem." Then, in my thought, I heard God telling me, "Don't yield the issue to Me, yield to Me as the issue."

I caught the shift in emphasis at once. By holding on to this difficulty and then at the same time trying to give it to God, I was accepting it as a real and powerful thing. I was starting from the premise that I was a mortal, independent of God, with relationships that were sometimes good and sometimes bad, and then trying to get God to help me straighten out this bad one.

But God didn't create unhappy relationships, or natures that don't get along. God doesn't know anything about conflict in His universe or any basis for its creeping in. God is pure Spirit and has created each one of us as His likeness. So we are actually spiritual. Furthermore, God is both All and all good. Therefore, He cannot know evil in any form. The Bible assures us, "Thou art of purer eyes than to behold evil, and canst not look on iniquity" (Hab. 1:13).

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