Misery: The Price of Control

I know a married couple who are eating each other alive. It is a horrible thing to watch. Both are so consumed in the other's wrongdoings that they can't see anything else. They are helpless to see any answer or a solution other then bringing that other person down, making them pay an enormous price, and then demanding perfection from there on out. It is an impossible ideal. They are each wrought with pain; sometimes the pain seems almost physical. They think that if the other person would just change then they would be free to be nice and happy. It seems they think it would be so much easier to try to control the other person then it would be to change themselves. They believe that it is the other person who is holding them in this painful bondage. But that isn't true. It is their own white knuckled grip that is keeping them captive. Like prisoners holding on to chains that aren't even locked around their wrists. And yet they stay day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, chained, and fighting. It would make me not want to live.
Control.
When you think about it, the really big things in our lives, some of the defining things about us, were things over which we had no control: our race, our gender, or nationality, the year of our birth, the family we were born to, our genetics including our predisposition to certain cancers or other illnesses, the color of our eyes, our IQ, our disabilities, the size of our nose, ears, and feet. Sure, some of these things we can alter or interfere with. But when we came to earth, these circumstances came with us, as part of us.
But there are so many things we do choose. We make choices to save money or waste it, study or drop out of high school, have unprotected sex, exercise regularly, go to counseling, break the law, get married, abuse our kids, or go to church. We choose our friends. We choose our enemies. We love feeling in control. It really is an illusion of control, though. We can never leave our houses, brainwash our kids and spouse to do and say whatever we want, cling to our philosophies, and only associate with people who agree with us. But there is nothing we can do really, to stop an undetected heart defect from suddenly stopping our heart from beating or having a seizure and becoming a vegetable or even a terrorist plane from slamming into your building.
Wow this post is uplifting, huh?
I think our lives are like a handful of sand. The tighter we squeeze, the more we lose. We insist on control, even if it means our lover must leave us to keep from being suffocated. I just had a good friend break up with someone she loved very much because he was so afraid of loosing her, he was suffocating her. That's what control does. It causes the very opposite of what the controller wanted.
Here's where we come to me.
I'm not really sure what it is I am trying to control. But I know I am trying to control because I find myself in kind of a resistance to God. In a way, it kind of baffles me. I love Him. I have known Him. It was so good to be close to Him. And yet the idea of praying, talking to Him makes me inwardly groan right now. I think I have some sort of strong hold in my heart. Something I am keeping from Him. Something I am trying to hide and control.
C. S. Lewis once wrote, "The choice of every lost soul can be expressed in the words, 'Better to reign in Hell then serve in Heaven.' There is always something they insist on keeping, even at the price of misery."

What am I insisting on keeping?

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