Mine!” I remember my two-year-old speaking with certainty when she would grab a toy away from her older sister. “Mine,” was one of the first words I believe my youngest daughter spoke as a toddler. When she uttered that word, it was also accompanied with some choreography. On any other occasion, she may have still been a little wobbly on her feet when she walked. But all of a sudden, when she would see her older sister playing with a toy that she felt was solely hers, she could somehow make her way across the room with an accomplished Quick-Step to where her sister was playing. Then without any hesitation, she would grab the toy from her sister’s hands and declare, “MINE!”

This behavior must be instinctive. I never modeled for my children the “mine” mentality. Although those moments frequently required me to step in and teach the concept of sharing, I have often wondered where do toddlers develop the belief that certain toys belong exclusively to them–if it’s not taught? How much easier those moments would have been if my daughter’s declaration to her sister instead, would simply have been, “yours.”

Does the “mine” mentality go beyond the toddler years? As an adult, are there certain things we presume belong exclusively to us–our life, our dreams, our desires, our future, our plans? God says in Jeremiah 29:11, “For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord…” And in Isaiah 55:8, God proclaims that His ways are not our ways.

Yet, how often do we want our way, and try to live our life as though, we know the plans we have for us…? And just like my daughter when she was a toddler, we want to grab our life from God’s hands and declare, “Mine!”

Guilty. I realized the other day that sometimes I still struggle with the “mine” mentality too. When I’m frustrated with the direction certain things in my life are heading, when I believe that if I do A, then B should follow, but it doesn’t. Or, when God seems to be taking me down a road I don’t want to travel, my natural instinct seems to lead me to that “mine” mentality. It’s during those moments that I want to declare exclusive rights to my life.

When we look at the story of the rich man in Mark 10:17-22, we see a man who clearly believed in Christ and wanted to inherit eternal life. He was a man who had followed the Ten Commandments since he was a boy. But when Jesus told him that he needed to sell all his earthly possessions and follow Him, the man couldn’t bring himself to do it. The Message version says, “He was holding on tight to a lot of things and not about to let go.”

While my struggle may not be with letting go of earthly possessions like the rich man in Mark, I do struggle with not always wanting to let go of my life. And where do I get the idea that my life belongs to me, when everything in God’s Word confirms that our life belongs to Him?

I know God can use my personal “mine” mentality moments to teach me the concept of trust. But how much easier would those moments be if rather than looking at my life as mine, instead I’d look at my life as though it was His? And willingly, at the feet of Jesus, I would lay my life down and simply declare, “Yours.”