A few weeks ago, I came across a poem written by the Lebanese-American writer Kahlil Gibran called Fear. There’s a moment in the poem when the river trembles before meeting the sea. It’s afraid of losing everything it knows: its shape, its name, its sense of control. But once it surrenders, it discovers that it was never meant to remain a river at all. 

It was always meant to become the ocean.

I have been thinking a lot about faith recently. We spend so much of our lives clinging to material safety, to our plans, our pride, our illusions of control, believing that surrendering to God means disappearing. But God doesn’t ask us to vanish. He asks us to yield, so He can fill us with something greater than ourselves.

St. Francis understood this mystery: “It is in dying that we are born to eternal life.”

To me, that dying isn’t merely of the body, it’s the death of the self that resists Grace. It’s the letting go of greed, lust, control, and selfishness so that something purer can take their place.

When we release what binds us, we begin to see the vastness of God’s power moving through us. We realize that we were never separate from His current, only unaware of how deeply we belonged to it.

The act of letting go became an important moment in the faith journey but it is also a pivotal point in the journey of chronic illness.

As a rheumatologist, and later, as a patient diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis and Sjogren’s disease, I remember the initial fear and denial that came with those words. What do you mean I have RA? I am a rheumatologist, I am supposed to treat it, not have it. Those are my knee-jerk thoughts at the time of diagnosis. I needed time to grieve, to process what felt like the end of the life I knew. But in time, I realized it wasn’t an ending. It was an unplanned transformation.

Starting treatment wasn’t a surrender to defeat, it was a surrender to healing. Acceptance opened a path that was not possible before. The disruption became an invitation to listen differently, to live deeper, to empathize more fully.

To surrender, then, is not to end. It’s to begin.

It’s to stop being the river that fears and become the ocean that knows.

Do you have a moment like that of the river on precipice of joining the ocean, full of uncertainty? What helped you to overcome that fear? I’d love to hear your story.