What Do Marshmallows Have to do With Control?

“Here I am All my intentions All my obsessions I want to lay them all down In Your hands Only Your love is vital Though I'm not entitled Still You call me Your child

God You don't need me But somehow You want me Oh, how You love me Somehow that frees me To take my hands off of my life And the way it should go

Oh, give You control Oh, I want to give You control I give You control.”

Although I’ve heard this Tenth Avenue North song, aptly titled Control, dozens of times before, for some reason when it came on in the car while I was driving yesterday, the lyrics spoke to me in a way that they never had in the past.

God loves me.

I am His child.

That frees me to let go of the control I have on my life, and give it over to God. Nothing I can do or fail to do changes the truth of me belonging to God and his unconditional love for me.

Surrendering control in many areas of my life is something I’ve been working on since…birth. My mom often would tell me, “Calesse, you need to learn to be more flexible, or one day you’re just going to break.” I brushed her words of wisdom aside, but as I’ve grown and become (what I hope) wiser, the truth and imperative nature of her words have struck a chord with me. More recently the repercussions of my constant desire to exert such tight control in my life have left me feeling empty and at a loss for all the factors that seem frustratingly out of my control, no matter how hard I try.

Perhaps you can relate to this. Usually, as my stress level rises, my instinct to control grows stronger. I seek to control people in my life, circumstances, what and how much I eat, my physical activity, and every other component of my life. But as I’ve seen again and again, truly, the tighter I desire to hold on to and control all of these things, the more my life seems to slip through my fingers; the joy, the pleasure, the satisfaction with my life evaporates.

While I was visiting the Caribbean island nation of Grenada with my husband and his family for a mission trip, we gave a lesson to the kids at Vacation Bible School (VBS) about peace, one of the fruits of the Spirit. We taught them the story of how Jesus calmed the storm when the disciples were scared. They didn’t believe that Jesus would take care of them, and they wanted to take things into their own hands.

In the gospel of Mark it says, “He [Jesus] woke up and rebuked the wind, and said to the sea, ‘Peace! Be still!’ Then the wind ceased, and there was a dead calm. He said to them, ‘Why are you afraid? Have you still no faith?’ And they were filled with great awe and said to one another, ‘Who then is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?’”

When we have faith that Jesus has our best interests at heart and that if we do our best to follow Him, we can experience an amazing peace that nothing else can replicate. With that peace also comes the opportunity to receive the bountiful blessings God greatly desires to bestow upon us.

At first, I had no idea how I was going to introduce this to the children in a way that would both “hook” them into the lesson, and be meaningful to them. Then I remembered the famous Stanford Marshmallow Study from the 19060s I had learned about in psychology class in high school. Several hundred pre-school aged children were seated in a room with a marshmallow in front of them. An adult told each child that if he could wait 15 minutes, he would receive an additional marshmallow. As the study participants were tracked over time, the researchers noted a strong correlation between those who were able to exhibit self-control and delay gratification (wait for the second marshmallow) and academic success in high school and beyond.

Clearly, control is not all bad, but being overly controlling can pose challenges for us. So, in order to provide a concrete demonstration illustrating what can happen when we seek too much control, versus when we hand control over to God, we gave the children at the Vacation Bible School a handful of marshmallows.

“Hold your hands cupped and open towards the sky,” we told them as we handed out the marshmallows. “These marshmallows represent blessings God wants to give you. They are delicious and wonderful and often unexpected. When we are at peace, our bodies and minds are relaxed and our hands can remain loose and open; we are able to receive God’s blessings. Now instead, when we feel anxious and are not placing our full faith and trust in God, our muscles tighten and as we seek control, we want to hold tightly to everything we have so we don’t lose it. Squeeze your hands tightly closed like you might when you are feeling stressed.”

As you might expect, when the children squeezed their hands shut, two things happened. First, the marshmallows became a big goopy mess in their hands, oozing out between their fingers. Not very appetizing…And second, with their fingers tightly closed, they were no longer able to access the blessings (marshmallows) they did have to begin with. So not only were they shutting down the possibility that God could give them additional blessings, but they were no longer able to experience how God’s good will was working in their lives previously.

While this may seem like a silly metaphor, it may be helpful to remember that faith and peace go hand-in-hand with experiencing all the good opportunities God lovingly wants to share with us. After all, our “marshmallows” are all on loan from God anyway, so who are we to try to hold on to them and tell God, “You know what, I’ve got this!"? "I don’t need you. I can control my life better than you can.”

Yes, easier said than done, but perhaps a mindset to strive after in the scary, unexpected nature of our world today.

God wants to give you lots of marshmallows, but you’ve got to open your hands to Him first.