Surrender is not acquiescence, reluctantly yielding; it is an opening up to unknown possibility.  In Whistling in the Dark, my dear Mr. Buechner explains sleep as surrender.

…a laying down of arms.  Whatever plans you’re making, whatever work you’re up to your ears in, whatever pleasures you’re enjoying, whatever sorrows or anxieties or problems you’re in the midst of, you set them aside, find a place to stretch out somewhere…

An inner yieldedness, Cynthia Bourgeault calls this state.

As I enter a week of out of the ordinary opportunity, I want to remind myself of how to be open on the inside. Too often I am anxious, controlling, and self-conscious.   How do I soften, open and yield.

Surrender is not an outer state, like rolling over and playing dead, that is precisely what troubles me about the idea of surrender I learned from my childhood faith.

Bourgeault continues in Wisdom Way of Knowing.

On the contrary, interior surrender is often precisely what makes it possible to see a decisive action that must be taken and to do it with courage and strength…action flows from that place of relaxed, inner opening.

Setting aside or laying down all anxiousness, all the reasons “it” won’t work, all my inadequacies to stretch-out in God’s provision.