“The cancer was not my issue. That was God’s issue. That’s not my issue. My issue is, ‘Go to the doctor, do what they say, and follow your instructions.’ That’s my part.”
The woman who said this had just received a cancer diagnosis. She was not in denial. She was not performing calm for our benefit. She had done something that is, in its own way, extraordinary: She had handed her cancer to God and gotten to work.
We heard something like this again and again in our study of Black Christian women navigating cancer. For many of them, the moment of diagnosis was not primarily a moment of despair. It was, surprisingly, a moment of surrender. Not the white-flag kind — not defeat or resignation or giving up. Something else entirely. Something that looked, from the outside, remarkably like peace.
Another woman, after receiving her diagnosis, told her doctor, “Well, just let me know what I need to do. I know God has this under control.” Then she went home and followed every instruction her medical team gave her.
We have spent almost 10 years researching how Christians navigate suffering — interviewing over 80 people across diverse communities and conducting several large-scale surveys on their coping strategies, spiritual lives, and outcomes. What we found in this group of Black women captured our attention. They had discovered something about surrender that much of contemporary Christianity has lost: the difference between giving up and giving over.
What We Think Surrender Means
The word “surrender” is fraught in our culture. We associate it with defeat: armies capitulating to enemies, white flags, humiliation, and the end of the fight. When Christians say, “Let go and let God,” they often mean something uncomfortably close to this: stop trying, stop struggling, stop trying so hard to make things happen. Just be passive. Just float.
But this is not the biblical picture.
Surrender, as it appears throughout Scripture, is not the cessation of effort. It is the reorientation of effort, a loving, active, inward yielding to God and God’s will in one’s life. Each word in that definition matters.
Loving: Surrender is not coerced. God is not an enemy who has conquered us and now demands our submission. He is a Father who invites our trust. When we surrender to God, we do so willingly because we have come to know that he is trustworthy — that his will, even when it leads through places we would not choose, is oriented toward our good. The motivation is not fear of punishment but love of the one to whom we yield.
Active: Surrender is something we do, not something that happens to us. The women we interviewed didn’t drift into surrender. They chose it. In some cases, they chose it at the very moment of diagnosis, before they had time to think carefully. But it was a choice, and that choice did not release them from responsibility. It clarified it.
Inward: This is perhaps the most counterintuitive piece. What changes in surrender is not primarily what we do but what we carry. The woman who told her doctor, “God has this under control,” still showed up for every appointment. What changed was the weight she was carrying in her chest, the weight of needing to control what she could not control, of needing to understand what could not yet be understood. That weight, she gave to God.
The Garden
Jesus modeled this in Gethsemane.
We tend to read that scene as evidence of Jesus’ humanity: his genuine anguish at what was coming, the honest cry to the Father to “let this cup pass” (Matthew 26:39). And that reading is correct. Jesus did not mask his anguish. He was in distress, and he said so.
But notice what he did with that distress. He prayed. Not once, but three times, returning again and again to the same petition, pressing it, refusing to let it go. There is nothing passive in this. The Greek verb tense Peter uses elsewhere to describe Jesus’ ongoing surrender — “he kept entrusting himself” to God (1 Peter 2:23) — conveys repetition, regularity, a continuous and deliberate act of the will.
And threaded through each of Jesus’ prayers is the refrain: “Not my will, but yours be done” (Luke 22:42). This is not resignation. It is not the exhaustion of someone who has given up fighting and decided it doesn’t matter anymore. It is something far more demanding: the active, ongoing choice to trust the Father even when the cup is not removed.
Jesus prays with full urgency—the cry is real—and he surrenders with full intention. These are not opposites. They are the same movement.
In John 10, Jesus makes this explicit: “No one takes my life from me, but I lay it down of my own accord” (v. 18). The cross was not something that happened to Jesus. It was something he chose, continuously, all the way to the end.
What the Research Found
In one study, we examined the relationship between spiritual surrender and life satisfaction in a large sample of Christians who had experienced a significant negative life event. As expected, the more severe the event, the lower people’s life satisfaction — with one exception. Among those who scored higher on spiritual surrender, the severity of the event had no effect on life satisfaction. They maintained a sense of their lives as meaningful and worth living even in the face of severe adversity.
This is not the finding you would expect if surrender meant passivity or fatalism. Passive acceptance — the resigned shrug of “I guess this is just what God wants”— does not tend to produce flourishing. What produced flourishing was something different: an active, relational yielding that released the sufferer from the burden of controlling what could not be controlled, while keeping them fully engaged with what could.
In our study of Black Christian women at the time of cancer diagnosis, we divided participants into those who showed substantial distress and those who showed relatively little. The distinguishing factor was not the severity of their diagnosis or their socioeconomic circumstances. It was the presence or absence of spiritual surrender.
And crucially, surrender and active engagement were not in tension for these women. They went hand in hand.
Surrender and Agency
One of the subtler distortions of Christian teaching on surrender is the idea that our efforts don’t matter, that because God is in control, human action is largely beside the point. If everything is in God’s hands, why fight?
The apostle Paul addresses this directly in Philippians 2: “Work out your salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you to will and to act” (vs. 12-13).
The logic is striking: work hard, because God is working, not in spite of it. The collaborative nature of the Christian life means that God’s sovereignty and human responsibility do not cancel each other out; they both can be true. We work because God is at work.
The women we interviewed lived this paradox. They surrendered their cancer to God and then went to every appointment, followed every instruction, did everything within their power.
One of them described her response to diagnosis as: “For real? Really, God? Okay, let’s just get this done. Let’s just do it.” The surrender was immediate and total. The engagement was equally immediate and total.
What surrender changed was not their activity but their anxiety. Psychologists have long understood that anxiety typically arises from two conditions in tandem: a low sense of control over one’s circumstances, combined with a high need to be in control. When both are present, the result is often a kind of paralysis or exhausted striving, pouring enormous energy into trying to manage what cannot be managed.
Surrender interrupts this cycle, not by solving the problem but by releasing the need to solve it. The cancer was still there. The uncertainty was still there. What these women relinquished was not the fight but the futile fight: the attempt to control outcomes that were genuinely beyond their reach.
The Humility at the Center
Running through the testimonies of the women we interviewed was a quiet thread of intellectual humility, a willingness to acknowledge the limits of their own understanding without being undone by those limits.
Following Augustine, our colleague Kent Dunnington describes this as “glad intellectual dependence on God”: a posture that recognizes our finitude not as a defect to be overcome but as part of what it means to be creatures in relationship with a Creator. We do not know everything. We cannot see what God sees. And this, surprisingly, is not a source of despair but of release.
One of our participants put it this way: “I can just give it to God: ‘I don’t understand this. Is there something you want me to know, and if there is, could you tell me?’ Maybe he doesn’t want me to know. I guess when I get to heaven he’ll tell me why.”
Rather than demanding an explanation before she could trust, she accepted the presence of a purpose she could not yet see and found that acceptance strangely freeing.
Another participant, reflecting on the question “why me?”, said: “I think the ‘why me’ to me is very selfish because it should be ‘why not me?’ I’m not any better than anybody else in this earth.” She had surrendered not just her cancer but her prior assumption that faithfulness would protect her from suffering. And in doing so, she found herself standing on more solid ground.
The Peace That Passes Understanding
Paul writes from prison that “the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 4:7). This is not the peace of solved problems. It is the peace of a held heart — a peace that does not require circumstances to change before it arrives.
The women we interviewed described this kind of peace. One spoke of the comfort and closeness to God she experienced when she “put her life in God’s hands.” Another described a sense of being held even in the uncertainty of her diagnosis. These were not women who had stopped caring about their outcomes. They cared deeply. They fought hard. But something had shifted at the center.
Surrender, they discovered, is not the end of the fight. It is the beginning of fighting from the right place: from a posture of trust rather than terror, of dependence rather than desperate control.
Jesus prayed three times in the garden that the cup would pass. It did not pass. And he kept entrusting himself to the Father. All the way to the cross.
That is not giving up.
That is the most active thing a person can do.
It is also, we would suggest, one of the most human things a person can do, a return to what we were always meant to be: creatures held by a Creator, finite beings in the hands of an infinite God, people who fight hard for what matters precisely because they are not fighting alone.
Elizabeth Lewis Hall is a clinical psychologist and professor at Rosemead School of Psychology, Biola University and has over 150 academic publications.
Kelly M. Kapic holds the Honorary Chair of Theology and Culture at Covenant College and has written or edited over 20 books.
Jason McMartin is a theologian at Biola University and has served as an urban missionary and bi-vocational pastor.
Their book When the Journey Hurts: Finding Meaning in Suffering for Heart, Mind, and Soul (IVP, 2026) draws on almost 10 years of interdisciplinary research.