Out of Our Control

Horror movies play on our fear of helplessness. If you’re anything like me, the terror comes because someone or something else is in control of what happens, and whatever is in control is usually malevolent.

This translates to our everyday lives as well. Take a glance at the self-help section in any bookstore or library, and you will be inundated with suggestions for taking control of your life. According to them, if we learn perfect self-control, we will be confident, successful and in happy.

But it’s not actually very healthy for us to be in absolute control. In fact, we have a number of names for controllers. Tyrant. Dictator. Bully. Abuser. Terrorist. Control freak. Manipulator. Obsessive-compulsive. Anorexic. Gym nut. Workaholic. Alcoholic. Suicide. The list goes on and on.

“But wait,” you say. “Some of those names don’t describe controllers. They describe addicts –— people controlled by something or someone else.”

That’s true — but it’s not for the reasons you might think. In fact, the more we seek control over something, the more that thing grasps us in a vise-like grip. It becomes our obsession, our addiction. And, before too long, we have to either recognize that we are now controlled by yet another thing in our lives, or we must continue to falsely believe we are in control.

I face that a lot myself. I yearn for perfect self-control. I want the perfect figure, the right interests, the ability and focus to do my work perfectly. There’s a reason I cared so much about grades from high school through college; grades were my control of choice. I felt I could control my life if I just studied and worked hard enough. For the most part, the hard work paid off, but those times I did poorly were absolutely crushing.

I read a Washington Post article last week titled “What I’m learning from my son’s eating disorder” by David Bachman. Bachman’s son suffers from anorexia nervosa and is in his third inpatient treatment program, so Bachman only gets limited visits with his son. In one visit, he got 60 minutes — and his son alternated between expressions of hatred for his father and bitter sobs nearly the entire time.

Bachman’s response was, “Remaining calm and in control was my best ammunition to not placate the eating disorder voice controlling his mind.”

In Bachman’s mind, self-control is the cure for this mess, but what he really doesn’t get is that excessive self-control actually caused this mess. He believes his son is controlled by an eating disorder, but what he doesn’t realize is that this sort of illness usually starts as a very deliberate one.

I’ve read several books with protagonists struggling with eating disorders, and if there’s anything I’ve learned from them, it is that people with eating disorders are under the illusion that they are in control — perhaps because that may be the only form of control they think they can have in their lives. But, before long, the obsession to lose weight becomes the controlling force for their every thought and action. Some become suicidal or cease to care about their lives at all. That’s not evidence of being in control. That is evidence of having lost control.

Two weeks ago, I attended a conference in Fort Wayne, Indiana, called the Ethics of Infertility Symposium. It was designed for those who want to know more about issues like barrenness, adoption, in vitro fertilization (IVF) and snowflake adoption. (Snowflake adoption is adoption of frozen embryos.)

What I took away from that symposium is that we all-too-frequently believe we can control fertility and infertility. The prevailing belief is that women can control when they get pregnant — if not naturally, then with the help of science. But success rates for IVF are less than 30 percent, according to several websites, and, according to the Guttmacher Institute, 51 percent of women who have abortions were using contraceptives when they became pregnant.

In 2011, a little more than 730,000 abortions were reported to the Center for Disease Control; half of that number is 365,000. That’s not even the total number of children conceived when their mothers were taking birth control. That’s just the number of children who were killed because the birth control didn’t work. And even that number is incomplete—some states do not report abortion statistics to the CDC.

This is not evidence of control. This is a massive, nation-wide illusion of control. If we could truly control fertility or infertility, every IVF procedure would be successful the first time with the first embryo. No one would become pregnant unexpectedly. There would be no abortions. No one would ever suffer miscarriage or infant loss — in fact, death would be foreign to us.

But we don’t have control — and does that matter? Well, here’s the important part: if God exists, He is, by definition, in control and, if he has created us in the first place, He has our best interests in mind, no matter what evil we see in the world. If you had “fearfully and lovingly” made anything, would you destroy it on a whim?

To me, that’s the opposite of a horror movie. In horror movies, the controlling force wishes us harm. But if a loving God is in control, even when bad or unexpected things happen, well, that’s the situation I want to be in. If He gives us what we need and what is for our good, then I can relinquish control without fear.

I can even trust that some good will come out of the monstrous evil in the world, including ISIS, because the God who would die for you and me and even for Hitler and ISIS terrorists, and then rise from the dead, is the One I want to be in total control of my life.