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Learning to Love Without Carrying — A Spiritual Practice

Learning to Love Without Carrying — A Spiritual Practice

Last updated on: June 12, 2026 at 8:38 am by Christine Moriarty Field

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Learning to Love Without Carrying — A Spiritual Practice 2026-06-12T08:38:47-05:00 Christine Moriarty Field

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Last week I wrote about the burden many of us carry — the invisible weight of over-responsibility for the people we love most. This week I want to talk about what it actually looks like, spiritually and practically, to begin setting it down.

Because surrender, in my experience, is one of the most misunderstood concepts in the Christian life.

Image courtesy of Unsplash

We talk about it constantly. We sing about it. We pray it with genuine intention. And then we walk out of church and immediately pick back up the thing we just said we were releasing to God.

Not because we’re faithless. But because nobody ever showed us what surrender actually looks like in the ordinary moments of an ordinary Tuesday.

Surrender Is Not a Feeling

The first thing I had to learn about genuine surrender is that it rarely feels like peace — at least not at first.

When I finally stopped rescuing my daughter from her own consequences, I didn’t feel a warm spiritual glow of release. I felt terrified. I felt guilty. I felt like a failure dressed up as someone practicing healthy boundaries.

The peace came later. Sometimes much later. And it came not because the situation resolved itself the way I’d hoped, but because I had stopped fighting a battle that was never mine to fight in the first place.

Surrender is not a feeling you wait to have before you act. It is a choice you make before the feeling arrives — trusting that the feeling will follow, even when it doesn’t come immediately.

What Releasing Actually Looks Like

In practical terms, releasing someone you love to God’s care looks like this:

It looks like answering the phone without your stomach already in crisis mode — or sometimes, prayerfully, not answering at all and trusting that God is present in the gap your absence creates.

It looks like praying genuinely open prayers — not Lord, here is what needs to happen and here is the timeline but Lord, I don’t know what’s best here, and I’m releasing my grip on the outcome.

It looks like tolerating the discomfort of your child’s anger at your new boundaries without immediately capitulating to make the discomfort stop — trusting that love can survive tension, that relationship can survive disappointment, that God is working in the very friction you’re so desperate to smooth away.

It looks like reminding yourself, on the hard days, of the truth that has sustained me through more than I ever expected to face: there is only one Savior in this story, and it is not me.

The Gift Hidden in the Releasing

What I have found, on the other side of genuine surrender — imperfect, daily, sometimes hourly surrender — is something I didn’t expect.

I found myself.

When I stopped spending all my spiritual energy managing outcomes that belonged to God, I discovered I had capacity I didn’t know I possessed. For prayer that was actually conversation rather than instruction. For listening to my own soul rather than constantly attending to everyone else’s. For the quiet, steady sense that I was exactly where I was supposed to be, doing exactly what was mine to do — and nothing more.

Releasing what was never yours is not spiritual failure. It is spiritual maturity. And the woman on the other side of that releasing — the one who loves fully, prays genuinely, and trusts deeply — is freer than she has ever been.

If you need some help in this area, I’d encourage you to check out my ebook, Marriage and Motherhood Survival Method.

Let’s Discuss: Where in your life are you praying for surrender but still holding on? What would it look like to genuinely open your hands today?

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