You Can't Outrun the Train: Darlene Gay on Letting Go of Control and Trusting God

This week, a woman out jogging was struck and killed on the train tracks beside Darlene Gay's workplace. The man running next to her wasn't hit. According to reports, the two had been trying to outrun the train.

Gay doesn't claim to know what happened. "Maybe it was intentional. Maybe it wasn't. Maybe it was an accident." Whatever the cause, she calls it a senseless death. What stays with her is the picture: a train you can hear coming, tons of steel bearing down, and someone deciding they could beat it anyway.

"You think you can outrun life?"

On this episode of Give Me That Good News, that question drives a warning about what Gay calls the idol of control.

The Idol at Our Fingertips

Gay believes we're entering a new age, the AI age, and that it's changing how we think about help. When everything seems controllable from our fingertips, it's easy to decide we don't need anybody else, including God.

She sees that as the trap. "When we are in control, we are edging God out." We slip back into a familiar refrain: me, I, I can do it, I need. This is happening just as the lines between right and wrong are blurring. The black and white is turning gray, and without the eyes of the Holy Spirit, telling the difference becomes very hard.

We all need help, she says, and we need it more today than ever before.

To break those chains, Gay built an acronym out of the word itself: Confidence, Obedience, Navigate, Thanksgiving, Remove, Open, Let go. Each letter names a daily practice. Together they pull us out of our own control and back under God's.

Instructions and Directions

The first two letters are the foundation. For Gay, confidence in the Lord is not a mood. It comes from studying His Word and keeping up a life of prayer, praise, and worship. Confidence means trusting that God will do what He said He will do, no matter what things look like.

Obedience grows out of that confidence, and here Gay draws a useful distinction. When the Holy Spirit gives instructions, there's a task to complete in a set order. When He gives direction, you receive it as you go. You don't know what comes next, but you keep moving because you trust the One leading you.

To our anxious need to know the plan, she hears a plain answer from God: My ways are not your ways, and My thoughts are not your thoughts. "So calm down. Lean into me. Not into your money. Not into your circumstances."

Strapped to a Hospital Bed

Gay learned she wasn't in control the hard way. In 1996, an accident turned her life upside down in nanoseconds. She had her classes and her plans, and she thought she had everything under control. Then God said no.

"When God pulls you and straps you down to a hospital bed, He will get your attention. And it's not fun. But you can hear the voice of the Lord."

In her acronym, that's what "remove" means. First, we dismantle the controls we think we have. Then we clear out the doubt and worry that rush in to fill the space. There's no time for second-guessing, she says, and no time for tiptoeing around the gospel. People are hurting, and some are leaning into suicidal thoughts. The desperation was always there, but now everyone can see it.

So her challenge is blunt: get uncomfortable. Comfort is how we drift into believing the train isn't really coming.

She also warns against brushing off faith as something only for church people. "Don't get caught. That train is coming. We don't know the day nor the hour."

Earthly Vessels

For Gay, the answer to control isn't more effort. It's being filled.

She reads from Jesus Calling, Sarah Young's 365-day devotional, and dwells on what Young calls glory gifts. These are love, joy, and peace flowing from God's presence through us. We are earthly vessels, but we're designed to hold something heavenly: everything we need to be whole. That wholeness doesn't come from what other people have, and not even from a partner. "God makes us whole."

God gives so freely that we can't contain it. It overflows into other people's lives and into every room we walk into.

That's why the final letters are about release. Open your mouth and praise Him, and don't do it halfway. Give Him your whole heart, mind, and soul, because He asks for all of it. Then let go. She pictures casting your cares on God like a fishing line: "You take that rod and you throw it." Don't trust yourself, your knowledge, or your PhD, she says, because "things have been modified since you got your degree."

She closes with 2 Corinthians 4:7: "But we have this treasure in earthly vessels so that the surpassing greatness of the power will be of God and not of ourselves."

The train is coming either way. The only question is whether we keep running, or let God.