The act of surrendering is very difficult for those who realize that the battle is lost.

Surrender does not mean you have to understand everything. In fact, the less you understand and the more frustrated you are about something the more meaningful it is to turn it over in an act of surrender.

Sometimes when things are hard and your mental darkness starts to encroach, everything in you wants to keep fighting, struggling and forcing things to happen.

You do not like to quit. You are tenacious to a fault. You want to live.

But when you have done everything you can possibly do, when there is nothing more to give, when you are lying face down in the gutter of your mind, there is only one thing left to do – surrender.

Turn it all over and have faith that what is meant to happen will happen and leave it at that.

Surrender has an element of faith.

But it all depends into whose hands you are surrendering into. If you place your heart and soul in the hands of another person chances are that sooner or later they will let you down.

People are people. We are not perfect.

But it all depends into whose hands you are surrendering into. If you place your heart and soul in the hands of another person chances are that sooner or later they will let you down. People are people. We are not perfect.

We respect each other, but we can not turn everything over to one another. We can not even turn everything over to ourselves. We can believe in ourselves but we can not surrender into ourselves.

The only proper place to turn over the grand plan of your life is to the authority of a power bigger and grander than yourself.

‘You Want It Darker’ is the fourteenth studio album by Canadian singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen, released on October 21, 2016, by Columbia Records, nineteen days before his death.

The album was created towards the end of his life and focuses on death, God, and humor.

Cohen’s voice bears all of the gravitas of a man near death, weakened by the decay of his aging body. Haunting.

There is a cheerful sadness running through the work. The song is brilliant: raw, shocking honesty, protest in the face of the dark night of evil – spoken before the face of God.

The album captures the question of what suffering means for those who experience it and for those who cause it.

The song ‘ You Want It Darker’ was his final expression of ambivalent anger – and ultimate surrender – towards a God that can not be ignored, but at the same time, can not be liked very much either.

It does not sound like a rebellion, but a laying before God the cursed evil without submitting it to an easy resolve. Not cushioned, romanticized, coated, softened, but prayed out of dark faith into God.

I am the man who has seen affliction under the rod of his wrath; he has driven and brought me into darkness without any light; surely against me he turns his hand again and again the whole day long. He has made my flesh and my skin waste away, and broken my bones; he has besieged and enveloped me with bitterness and tribulation; he has made me dwell in darkness like the dead of long ago.

He has walled me about so that I can not escape; he has put heavy chains on me; though I call and cry for help, he shuts out my prayer; he has blocked my ways with hewn stones, he has made my paths crooked. He is to me like a bear lying in wait, like a lion in hiding; he led me off my way and tore me to pieces; he has made me desolate; he bent his bow and set me as a mark for his arrow.

He drove into my heart the arrows of his quiver. My soul is bereft of peace, I have forgotten what happiness is; so I say, ‘Gone is my glory, and my expectation from Yahweh.’ – Lam. 3:1-14; 17-18