Let Go

Why do we hold so tightly to people, promises, and outcomes? Sometimes we can’t let go until we discover that we are the ones being held.

Come with me for a minute.

Not into a lesson.

Not into something I have figured out and tied neatly with a bow.

I want to take you on a journey into the heart.

Because I have been discovering that sometimes the things we struggle with as adults didn’t begin where we think they did.

Sometimes there is a thread.

A belief we picked up so young we don’t even remember choosing it. A way of surviving. A way of staying connected. A way of making ourselves feel safe.

And then we grow up.

But the thread comes with us.

It weaves itself through our marriages and friendships. Through motherhood. Through our relationship with God. Through the way we pray and dream and hope and respond when life doesn’t look the way we thought it would.

We don’t even know it’s there.

We just know that certain things feel unbearably heavy.

We know we can’t seem to let go.

We know uncertainty makes us panic.

We know we keep trying to get somewhere other than where we are.

And sometimes, if we are willing to follow that thread backward, we find a little girl at the other end of it.

The Little Girl Who Learned to Hold On

I found mine recently.

She was very small.

My mom was on one side of her.

My dad was on the other.

And she was holding both of their hands.

At first, that sounds sweet.

It wasn’t.

She was desperate.

I could feel it in her little hands.

She wasn’t walking happily between Mommy and Daddy.

She was gripping them.

Please don’t let go.

Please don’t leave.

Please let everything be okay.

I could feel how hard she was trying.

And then I realized what she believed she was doing.

She was holding her world together.

Oh, that broke my heart.

Because she was so little.

She should have been held.

She should have been free to be sad when she was sad and angry when she was angry. She should have been able to need something without first checking whether everyone else in the room was okay.

But somewhere inside her little heart, she had gotten the message that connection was fragile.

So she learned to help hold it together.

She watched people.

She read the room.

She noticed what everyone needed.

She learned what version of herself worked best.

Be delightful.

Be helpful.

Don’t make things harder.

Don’t add another problem.

Stay with the script.

And when something rose up inside her that might disrupt things—a feeling, a need, anger, disappointment, a voice that wanted to say but what about me?—she learned to put her hand over her mouth.

Not now.

Don’t say that.

Don’t need that.

Keep holding.

I have so much compassion for her now.

Because she wasn’t trying to control people.

She was trying to feel safe.

And she didn’t know there was anyone strong enough to hold everything if she stopped.

When I Started Holding the Future

That little girl grew up.

And this is where following the thread became painful for me.

Because I could suddenly see her everywhere.

I could see her in the woman who felt responsible for the emotions in a room.

I could see her in the friend who wanted to fix someone’s pain.

I could see her in the mother who struggled to separate loving her children from carrying their lives.

I could see her in the woman who needed to understand what was coming next.

And I could see her in my relationship with God.

That one surprised me.

Because I love God.

I have walked with Him for years. I have heard Him speak in beautiful ways. I have watched Him weave things through my life that I never could have orchestrated myself.

There have been painful things that, looking backward, I can now see differently. They became part of something I couldn’t see while I was living them.

I think of those experiences like threads in a tapestry.

Some threads are dark.

Loss.

Disappointment.

Things I would never have chosen.

Others seem golden.

A promise.

A prophetic word.

A dream.

A moment when God speaks so clearly that you tuck it into your heart and carry it for years.

And I have gotten very good at studying the threads.

Oh. This connects to that.

Maybe this is why that happened.

Maybe this word is leading here.

Maybe this is what God is making.

There is nothing wrong with noticing.

There is something beautiful about looking backward and recognizing the faithfulness of God.

But without realizing it, I had begun doing something else.

I wasn’t just noticing the threads anymore.

I was trying to tell the Weaver what the tapestry had to look like.

I had collected enough gold threads that I thought I could see the picture.

This is where we’re going.

This is what God is doing.

This is what the promise means.

This is what His goodness is going to look like.

And then the future became very, very important.

Because I didn’t simply hope for it.

I needed it.

I needed life to turn out that way in order to be okay.

And when my present reality looked nothing like the picture I believed God was weaving, I didn’t know what to do with the contradiction.

So I tried harder to solve it.

I went backward.

What did God say?

What have I missed?

What does this thread mean?

Or I went forward.

When this happens, then everything will make sense.

When we get there, I’ll understand.

When the promise comes, I’ll finally be able to exhale.

But I had a terrible time simply being here, in the present.

Because here sometimes hurt.

Here didn’t always make sense.

Here didn’t look like the promise.

And underneath all of it were questions I was almost afraid to say aloud.

What if it doesn’t happen the way I thought?

What if I heard wrong?

What if I failed?

What if I didn’t believe enough?

And maybe the hardest one:

What if God’s goodness doesn’t look the way I decided it had to look?

That is a frightening question when you have built your safety around the answer.

And suddenly I could see that little girl in me again.

She had grown up, but the desperation felt strangely familiar.

She wasn’t holding Mom and Dad anymore.

She was holding the future.

She was holding promises.

She was holding people.

She was holding outcomes.

She was holding the story she needed God to write.

And somewhere deep inside, she was still saying the same thing.

Please don’t let go.

Please let everything be okay.

But What If You Let Go Too?

And this was the question God began pressing into.

What would happen if I opened my hands?

Not if I stopped loving.

Not if I stopped hoping.

Not if I stopped believing Him for good things.

But what if I stopped insisting that I had to know what those good things would look like?

That question took me back to the original image of myself between my parents.

I saw my little hands gripping theirs again.

And this time, God stepped into the scene.

He gently took their hands with mine.

But I didn’t immediately relax.

I was watching Him.

Holding my breath.

Hesitant to completely release my grip.

Okay.

If I give them to You, You’ve got this, right?

I didn’t have to say it. He seemed to know exactly what was happening in my heart.

And before He did anything else, He drew my attention away from their hands.

Look at Me.

I looked at His face.

Look at My face.

That mattered.

He wasn’t asking me to watch what He was going to do with them.

He wasn’t showing me the outcome.

He was asking me to look at Him.

To see His face.

To know Him.

To see Love looking back at me.

Not anger.

Not disappointment.

Not someone frustrated that I had held on too tightly for too long.

Not someone cruel.

Look at Me.

Know Me.

I’ve got this.

So I let go.

For a moment, He was holding the hands I had been gripping for so long.

And then—

He let them go.

Everything in me recoiled.

No.

No, no, no.

That’s not how this works.

If You tell me I can let go because You’ve got it, then You have to hold on.

You have to fix it.

You have to protect them.

You have to make it turn out right.

Otherwise, what are You asking me to trust?

It felt cruel.

And I told Him so.

Actually, I did more than tell Him.

I beat against Him.

All of it came out.

The anger.

The fear.

The betrayal.

The grief.

How could You?

This hurts.

I trusted You.

I didn’t give Him a spiritually appropriate response.

I didn’t surrender gracefully.

I didn’t take a breath and say, “Your ways are higher than my ways.”

I let Him have it.

And He took it.

He didn’t recoil from my anger.

He didn’t correct my tone.

He didn’t tell me I was being disrespectful.

He didn’t put His hand over my mouth.

He let me feel all of it.

And something about that was as important as letting go of my parents’ hands.

Because the little girl who had spent her life believing she needed to manage everyone else’s emotions was finally with a Parent who could handle hers.

I didn’t have to be delightful.

I didn’t have to be helpful.

I didn’t have to make this easier for Him.

I didn’t have to protect Him from my disappointment.

I didn’t have to stay with the script.

I could be furious.

I could be devastated.

I could tell Him that what He had just done felt cruel.

And He was still there.

He could hold my anger without becoming angry with me.

He could hold my grief without needing me to stop crying.

He could hold my questions without demanding that I understand.

He could hold me without requiring me to hold myself together.

And slowly, I began to understand what He was showing me.

When He said, I’ve got this, I had heard:

I will take control of the outcome and make it turn out the way you need it to.

But that wasn’t what He was offering me.

He was asking me to look at His face before I knew what happened next.

To know His heart without using the outcome as proof of His heart.

He wasn’t showing me what He thought about my parents.

He wasn’t showing me what He would or wouldn’t do in someone else’s life.

He was showing me my hands.

My grip.

My desperate belief that somebody had to guarantee the outcome or I wasn’t safe.

I had assumed surrender meant transferring that responsibility to God.

Fine. I won’t control the outcome. You control it.

I won’t make it happen. You make it happen.

I’ll let go—as long as You promise to make the ending look like this.

And suddenly I could see it.

That isn’t really letting go.

It is asking God to hold my preferred outcome for me.

And I felt exposed.

Because underneath so much of what I called faith was a little girl saying:

Please tell me how this ends so I can know I’m going to be okay.

But I was also beginning to discover something else.

I didn’t have to be okay with the outcome in order to be held by Him.

I think I had imagined surrender as eventually becoming okay with whatever happened.

But I wasn’t okay.

It hurt.

I hated it.

I wanted something different.

And apparently I could bring all of that with me.

I didn’t have to surrender my heart along with the outcome.

I didn’t have to stop feeling.

I could release what I could not control and still collapse against Him when it hurt.

He was strong enough for both.

Strong enough to hold what I could no longer carry.

And strong enough to hold me when I discovered I didn’t like what happened next.

I’ve Got You

God didn’t answer the little girl’s question by telling her how the story would end.

He did something so much more tender.

He came for her.

I saw the Father running toward me.

And this time I wasn’t looking at what He was doing with everybody else.

I wasn’t looking over His shoulder at the future.

I wasn’t checking His hands to make sure He was holding all the things I had released.

He was coming for me.

And then:

I’ve got you.

I cannot adequately explain what happened inside me when I understood that.

Something let go.

Something that had been braced for a very long time softened.

Because He wasn’t giving me an explanation.

He wasn’t giving me the ending.

He wasn’t showing me the finished tapestry.

He was giving me what that little girl had needed before she ever learned to grip so tightly.

Someone to hold her.

I began to see what I had really been searching for in all those outcomes.

I thought I needed to know what was going to happen.

I thought I needed the promise to look a certain way.

I thought I needed the dark threads to eventually justify themselves and the gold threads to lead exactly where I believed they were leading.

But what I really needed was to know that whatever thread was passing through my hands today, I was not passing through His.

I am held.

That changes something.

It doesn’t mean I don’t care about outcomes.

Oh, I care.

There are things I desperately want God to do. People I desperately want Him to rescue. Prayers I want answered. Dreams I still carry. Things I believe He has spoken that I still hope to see.

Letting go doesn’t mean becoming numb or pretending disappointment doesn’t hurt. It doesn’t mean calling every painful thing good. It doesn’t mean we stop asking.

It means I no longer have to make the answer responsible for my safety.

I can hope without turning hope into a demand. I can pray without first figuring out how God could possibly answer. And when something doesn’t look the way I thought it would, I don’t have to edit my disappointment into a more acceptable Christian response.

I can tell God the truth.

This hurts.

I’m angry.

I’m scared.

I really wanted this.

I don’t understand.

I need You.

For so much of my life, that little girl believed she had to put her hand over her mouth and stay with the script. But she doesn’t have to do that with Him.

I am His daughter.

He can handle my disappointment, my questions, my hope, my future—all of it.

And I think that is what is beginning to bring me back to the present.

Because when I need the future to prove that God is good, I miss today. I miss the person sitting across from me because I am trying to fix their story. I miss what my own heart is saying because I am trying to make my emotions line up with what I think should be true.

And I miss the face of God because I am staring at His hands, watching to see what He is going to do.

Look at My face.

There it is again.

I don’t know what the finished tapestry will look like. I don’t know where every golden thread is going or how the dark ones will become part of the story.

I don’t need to.

They are not what holds me.

He does.

And perhaps you have your own thread.

Something you keep gripping even though you’re exhausted from carrying it. Before you judge yourself for not being able to let go, follow that thread backward. There may be a younger you at the other end who learned a long time ago that something terrible might happen if she stopped holding on.

Don’t pry her fingers open.

Let her look up.

Let her see the face of Love.

Let her discover that she doesn’t have to hold everything together.

She doesn’t have to know the ending.

She doesn’t have to silence herself to keep everyone else okay.

She can let go—not because she knows what happens next, but because she finally knows she is not the one who will be dropped.

Come here.

I’ve got you.

In everything you do -eat, play, and love- may it always be seasoned with Joy!