Making Peace With What I Can't Control

Lysa TerKeurst, a Christian author, opens by acknowledging that while she does not consider herself a naturally controlling person, painful life experiences have turned control into a coping mechanism. She identifies a pattern she believes many readers share: when confronted with stressful situations or other people's irresponsible choices, fear takes over, and the impulse to steer, fix, or prevent bad outcomes follows. She draws a critical distinction: If stability depends on getting everything right all the time and pretending everything is fine, that is not true peace but control. She admits she trusts God yet does not want to live in the uncertainty of trusting Him with everything, and she invites readers to explore a better way to live.

TerKeurst grounds her argument in a vivid personal story. She wakes at 2:00 a.m. in a panic and discovers, through a location-sharing app, that a loved one with a known pattern of addiction is driving around in the middle of the night. She follows them and even stands in front of their vehicle to stop them. She identifies this as her fear response driving her control response, the conviction that if she does not intervene, no one will. Drawing on Genesis and John 15:5, she argues that apart from God, humans are incomplete, and only God knows what is truly best. Her efforts to control do not prevent her fears from coming true. Her real issue is not control but fear, specifically the fear that God will allow things she cannot bear.

She traces how past devastation led her to rely only on herself. On a flight 24 years earlier, she felt God pressing her to give her personal, annotated Bible to a businessman named Ron seated beside her. She resisted but eventually placed it on his lap. Weeks later, Ron called to say he had taken time off to read the Bible and started attending church. In the years that followed, TerKeurst endured a cascade of heartbreak: Her husband of over two decades cheated on her, she was diagnosed with cancer, she walked through an unwanted divorce, was publicly shamed, lost key friendships, and was sued by her ex-husband. These experiences left her feeling hurt by God and afraid of Him. Despite eventually beating cancer, remarrying a man named Chaz, and rebuilding her life, she remained consumed with fear about the future.

Twenty-four years after the flight, at a speaking event in San Antonio, Texas, Ron's daughter approached TerKeurst's team. Ron had given his heart to Jesus after receiving the Bible, led his family to faith, and treasured it until his death. His daughter held it out, and inside were TerKeurst's original notes interwoven with Ron's and then his daughter's. TerKeurst arrives at a key insight: Anything placed in God's hands is never truly gone.

TerKeurst then distinguishes between being responsible and being controlling. Using a conversation with her friend Leah, whose father died of a brain tumor, she illustrates the difference: Keeping one's family healthy is responsible, but trying to guarantee no one gets cancer crosses into control. She identifies seven variations of control: prevent, protect, pretend, prepare, perfect, perform, and predict.

She uses the biblical story of Judas Iscariot, one of Jesus's twelve disciples, as a case study. Many scholars believe Judas wanted Jesus to be a military messiah who would overthrow the Roman Empire's occupation of Israel. When Jesus refused, Judas may have betrayed Him to force a political confrontation, fooling himself into thinking he was helping God. TerKeurst draws the application: If Jesus is only a teacher, one stays in control; if He is Lord, one acknowledges safety in turning over what cannot be controlled.

TerKeurst next addresses the dynamics of trying to fix people who distort reality. She tells a story about cosigning a car loan for a friend who never made the payments and eventually rewrote the narrative to blame TerKeurst. She identifies three lessons: she took her help too far, her expectations were unrealistic, and she had to let go of a narrative she could not correct. She provides practical "flipped scripts," new internal statements to replace feelings of powerlessness.

She argues that fear is the engine behind control, stating that "control is fear disguised as strength" (77). She connects this to the Genesis account of the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Before Adam and Eve, the first humans in the biblical narrative, sinned, all their wisdom was processed in direct relationship with God. At the forbidden tree, they chose to gain knowledge outside God's presence, and the resulting awareness overwhelmed them with fear and shame. TerKeurst identifies Jesus as the Tree of Life for believers and argues that people face the same choice: try to figure things out alone, or turn to Jesus.

She describes the practice of having a definitive moment of releasing control to God. After a hard phone call where a loved one announces a decision she strongly disagrees with, she works through a journaling exercise covering what her sinful, fear-driven impulses want her to do, the lies Satan wants her to believe, what she fears, and what she could do as a responsible person. She then has her "marked moment of release," whispering to God that this person is His. When the loved one later shares their final decision, she simply says "Okay" and means it. Some of what she feared has happened, but she finds relief: The situation is part of her life but does not have to consume it.

TerKeurst presents a framework for interrupting fear responses, breaking fear into four components: attention, perception, memory, and reaction. While attention is largely outside one's control, perception and memory can be addressed through therapeutic work, including EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing). She organizes the path forward into four progressive phases: fear-based control, release, surrender, and stewardship. She defines surrender not as ignoring reality but as yielding the need to control the outcome, and stewardship as caring for others without owning their issues.

She argues that the only effective form of control in chaotic relationships is self-control, a virtue produced by God's Spirit and listed among the fruits of the Spirit in Galatians 5:22-25. She frames self-control not only as refraining from poor choices but as the freedom to make good choices. She reframes the relentlessness of everyday hardships as an invitation to focus on Jesus's relentless love, illustrating this with the story of two women at a conference who discovered that God had orchestrated the return of a lost earring as a sign of His personal care.

In the final chapter, TerKeurst identifies trust in God as the singular principle underlying the book's teaching. Drawing on Isaiah 30:15-18, where the prophet addresses the people of Judah, an ancient kingdom in the land of Israel, during a time of political turmoil, she quotes commentator Alexander Maclaren: Trust in God is "the one rule of life for us all" (190). She identifies four key words from Isaiah 30:15 as the rhythm of recovery from control: repentance, rest, quietness, and trust. She uses the image of Michelangelo's unfinished Prisoners statues in Florence, partially carved figures that appear trapped inside blocks of marble, as a metaphor for what happens when a person does not allow God to continue shaping them. The book concludes with a personal journal entry in which TerKeurst describes daring to untie the cape of control and discovering she did not die from letting go but started living, followed by a practical appendix on why boundaries in difficult relationships may not be working.