Knowing that control cannot heal you does not loosen your hands. A grip lives in your habits, your calendar and your body as much as in your beliefs, so it changes the way habits change: one specific thing at a time, practiced on purpose. This guide offers a way to do that. You will name what you are holding, bring it to God in the honest language of lament, and release it in pieces small enough to actually let go of, while keeping hold of the few things that really are yours to carry.
You can work through it alone in about an hour and then carry the practice through a week. A small group can do the first half together and meet again a week later to talk about what happened. Nothing here requires you to tell anyone anything. Every written exercise can stay on a page only you will see.
Begin with an inventory, not a verdict
Most people who grip hard do not experience it as gripping. It feels like being responsible. So start by observing, not by judging yourself.
In a Jude 3 Project panel conversation on power and pain, David Bailey drew on a point from Lisa Fields’s book. When people feel powerless, they reach for tools that give them a sense of control and let them shape the life they want. That sequence is worth testing on yourself. If it holds, then each tool you reach for points back to a place where you once felt powerless.
Take a sheet of paper and make three columns.
- In the first, list three to five things you actively managed this week. Be concrete: a conversation you rehearsed four times, a schedule with no gaps, a person whose mood you watched all evening.
- In the second, name the tool you used for each one. Planning, busyness, checking, staying quiet, staying in charge.
- In the third, finish the phrase I do this so that… for each line. Write the true answer, not the presentable one.
Now read the third column. Some answers will be ordinary: so the bills get paid, so the kids get to school. Others will sound more like this: so I am never caught off guard again, so nobody can leave without warning. Circle those. They are the material for the rest of this guide. The ordinary ones can stay as they are.
Psalm 13: a prayer that starts with complaint
Read all six verses of Psalm 13 aloud, slowly, once. It is a lament, the kind of prayer-poem the Psalms use to bring distress straight to God. Read it as poetry and prayer. It does not promise how quickly your circumstances will change.
Then read it again with a pencil and look for three things.
- Count how many times the psalmist asks how long. Notice that he does not apologize for asking.
- Find what he has been doing with his pain while he waits.
- Find the line where his voice turns.
The second observation is the one most readers skip. Psalm 13:2 reads, “How long shall I take counsel in my soul, having sorrow in my heart daily? how long shall mine enemy be exalted over me?” To take counsel in his soul is to work the problem over inside, alone, every day. The psalmist is describing his own anguish, not diagnosing anyone else, but the picture will feel familiar to anyone whose mind runs the same scenarios at two in the morning. Notice where that inner counsel sits in the poem. It is part of the complaint. He lists it among the things that hurt.
He does not stop that churning by deciding harder. He stops by turning his speech outward, toward God. Verse 3 is a request: “Consider and hear me, O LORD my God.” Then, in Psalm 13:5, the turn: “But I have trusted in thy mercy; my heart shall rejoice in thy salvation.” The text never says the enemy has disappeared by verse 5. Interpreters differ on whether the closing verses look back on a rescue or forward to one, and the poem does not settle it. What clearly changes is where the speaker places his weight.
Before moving on, a short private prompt: which verse of Psalm 13 is closest to where you are today? It is allowed to be verse 1.
Gethsemane: asking and yielding in one breath
Now read Mark 14:32-42, the night Jesus prays before his arrest. Mark 14:36 records the prayer itself: “And he said, Abba, Father, all things are possible unto thee; take away this cup from me: nevertheless not what I will, but what thou wilt.”
Look at the order. Jesus states what he believes about the Father. He asks plainly for what he wants, which is to be spared. Only then does he yield the outcome. Mark is describing a moment, not issuing a script to recite. Still, the shape of the prayer corrects a common mistake about surrender. Jesus does not pretend he wants the cup. Releasing the outcome does not require faking your desires. The word nevertheless comes after an honest request, not in place of one.
What the panel adds to the practice
Several voices in that Jude 3 Project conversation sharpen how this release works in real life. Each one changes something about the exercise you are about to do.
Bishop Charlie Haynes Jr. described the lasting pain he carried after years of fighting for justice in the Bay Area that never came. Healing began, he said, once he would “release the ability or the idea that you can control your pain” and begin to face it. Notice what he let go of. Not the pain, and not the feelings. He released the idea that he could control the pain. That matters for your circled items. You are not trying to make them stop hurting by the end of the week. You are resigning from the job of guaranteeing they never hurt you again.
Later in the conversation, Haynes offered a way to sort what remains: “there’s only two things that you can control, is your intention and your posture.” Use that as a dividing line. Almost every circled item has a part you can genuinely own, such as how you show up and what you aim at, and a part you cannot own, such as how others respond and whether the past repeats.
Mike Kelsey added that the hope of God’s final justice was never meant to make Christians passive. He said it “enables us to do what is ours to do” while leaving to God what belongs to God alone. He pointed to Fannie Lou Hamer, who kept working for the oppressed while trusting that vengeance belonged to God. Release, in this picture, frees your hands for the work that is actually yours.
Latasha Morrison named a grip that is easy to miss. Pain can be turned toward vengeance or toward reconciliation, and she said that “when you’re gonna heal, you have to kind of submit that pain and not take vengeance.” Some of what people hold tightly is a running score: a grievance replayed so it will never be forgotten. When Morrison described how she keeps going under burdens too big for her, she spoke of surrendering them to God in pieces: “Just taking it off in chunks, just small chunks.” That is why the practice below works one item at a time.
A fair objection: is letting go just giving up?
Test the idea before you practice it. Releasing control can be misheard in at least three harmful ways.
It can sound like passivity. Kelsey’s point answers that. What is yours to do remains yours, and you keep doing it.
It can sound like staying where you are being harmed. It does not mean that. Protecting yourself and your children is intention and posture. It belongs squarely in the column you keep. If someone is hurting you, the National Domestic Violence Hotline is available at 1-800-799-7233.
It can sound like swallowing your feelings. Haynes did say that in one tense meeting he had to check his emotions to act wisely. That was about how to behave in a boardroom. Lament is something else. Psalm 13 gives grief its full voice, addressed to God. Facing pain may also mean facing it with a counselor. Jude 3 Project holds that seeking therapy is not a failure of faith and that God works through trained counselors and clinicians. If the heaviness you are carrying has turned into thoughts of ending your life, call or text 988, the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline.
The practice: a three-line release, one piece a day
For the next seven days, take one circled item each day. Use the same one more than once if it needs it. Write three lines, borrowing the shape of Psalm 13 and Gethsemane.
- The complaint. In your own words, say what hurts and how long it has hurt. Do not tidy it. Something like How long will I keep bracing every time my phone rings? is enough.
- The request. Ask God for what you actually want, as plainly as Jesus asked for the cup to pass. If you want the situation fixed, say so.
- The yielding. Begin with nevertheless and name the specific outcome you are handing over. Keep it small and concrete: not your whole future, just tomorrow’s version of this one fear.
Then write two short notes underneath. First, one action that is truly yours tomorrow, an intention or a posture. Second, one tool from your second column that you will set down for one day: the extra check, the rehearsed speech, the unbroken schedule.
That evening, return to the page. What happened when you set the tool down? What did you feel? Did the thing you feared actually happen? Write the honest answer, including I picked it back up by noon.
Some days the third line will not feel true. Write it anyway as a request, help me mean this, or stop after the second line. The psalm itself takes six verses to turn, and Jesus prayed in Gethsemane more than once that night.
Leading this with others
If you are guiding a group, read Psalm 13 aloud together, then give everyone quiet time to fill in the three columns privately. Do not collect papers or ask people to read their lists. Invite comments on the Scripture observations, which anyone can discuss without exposing a wound.
Listen for quick reassurances such as just trust God offered to someone who has just named real pain. Gently slow the moment down. In Psalm 13 and in Gethsemane, honest complaint and trust stand side by side. If someone discloses abuse, danger or thoughts of self-harm, do not try to resolve it in the group. Stay with that person afterward and help them reach a pastor, a counselor or the hotlines above.
When the group meets again after the week, start by asking what people noticed, not what they achieved.
Questions for conversation
- Bailey’s point suggests that control is often a response to an earlier powerlessness. Does that fit what you see in your own patterns, in other people’s, or neither? Where might it not fit?
- The psalmist lists his own daily inner counsel among the things that hurt. Is constant mental problem-solving a form of control, a form of care, or does it depend? What would tell the difference?
- Jesus asked to be spared before he yielded. Why might some Christians feel that asking God to remove pain shows weak faith? What does Mark 14:36 do to that assumption?
- Try Haynes’s dividing line on one ordinary situation from your week. What landed on the side of intention and posture, and what did not? Was anything hard to place?
- Morrison described pain turning toward vengeance or toward reconciliation. What might a quiet, private form of vengeance look like, and what would submitting it involve without excusing the wrong?
- After a week of practice, what surprised you about which tool was hardest to set down?
After seven days
Go back to your original three columns. Read the third column again, the line that begins I do this so that… Has anything in it shifted? Is any item less tightly circled, or does a new one need adding? Do not grade the week. A grip loosened once is real evidence that it can loosen again.
Rahel Tesfamariam closed her part of the conversation by asking, “what is the darkest hours of your life teaching you?” She observed that the dark and low places are the ones we never want to go to. Releasing control means going a little way into one of those places each day, with words borrowed from a psalm and from the garden, and finding out whether God is already there. Carry her question into next week along with whatever you could not yet set down.