Thursday, December 01, 2011

How to let go...


Funny isn’t it, how this time last year I would make a list of things to be completed and life lessons I want so badly to learn before I turned 25? And ironically still is how on that list, somewhere towards the bottom I would put “learn what it means to surrender my love life to God”. Learn what it means to lay all of the relationships in my life at the footstool of my King and Creator and say to Him, “Do as you wish”. I thought that I had done just that, until lately.
            I don’t know if it is because I sit on the eve of my 25th birthday, if it because I just finished school and am free to enter the world and actually start a career or if it is just a change in the seasons but I feel now like God is telling me to learn this lesson and like a debt collector is knocking on my door. And with every knock a tension grows inside my fragile heart.            
            I am a loyal and forgiving individual, always seeking for the good in people and applauding their efforts as they navigate the darkness that we so often find ourselves overwhelmed by. Characteristics and evidence of an indwelling and living God who cultivates our hearts like a tender vine dresser. At the end of the day that may be what I love the most about myself as I wade through all my insecurities and failures. It reminds me that there is One who loves greater and longer than I ever could and is close enough to give me the stamina and the drive to persevere when all I want to do is give up and crawl in a hole. I suppose the trap in that is that I never know when to let go, I never know when to face the fact that something is over and for the sake of my heart and those involved it would just be better to part. I never know when to just take my hands off and find some way to move on. Even in my darkest moments of hurt and betrayal, when my heart is worn out from fighting and stretched too thin I will always want to go back and start again.
            But what do you do when God says surrender? When God says let go? This is where I find myself. I realize that for Christians our whole lives are to be lived in surrender to the will of the Most High, and that seems like a fantastic idea and an easy one to follow through when you know that surrender means that things will stay the same or carry on just the way you like them. But what happens when “surrender” and “let go” become synonyms for “I don’t know how things are going to play out” and “I’ve never been in this place before”?
            I have been doing a lot of hanging out in the Old Testament. I guess in all of this I have been craving the council of Moses and Solomon as they listened and waited, their whole lives placed in the hands of a God who would bring salvation that they would never see the living proof of. And I keep coming back to the same truth. That my God is a jealous God, an all consuming fire.
            I don’t like fires, they rage out of control and all they leave are charred remains of a once beloved life. I think this is why I don’t like God as a fire. Because destruction is scary and unable to control. And to be honest, I love my life. The last thing I want is a fire raging through it. Or do I?
             When the Israelites were to take the promised land they were told to destroy everything and start from scratch. They were to kill all the people and destroy the buildings and the temples and the houses and all the plates and cups and jewelery. They were told to keep nothing so that their hearts would not be lead astray by the customs and the religions of the land and its previous inhabitants. This to me, although doesn’t speak of fire, speaks to be about the idea of God being a raging inferno. Keep none of it, is the message here, destroy it all, sure it might be pretty and useful and there are probably things that you don’t have that you will find a need for but destroy it none the less because one day it will lead you astray. Unless you destroy it in My name, it will lead you down a path I have already rescued you from so many times before. And astray is where I have been finding myself lately. So caught up in making things work that my head is going into overdrive solving problems that I haven’t even encountered yet and my heart is attaching its self to events that haven’t yet come to pass.
            So maybe I don’t love my life as much as I thought I did because lately it has been so full of anxiety and just plain old turmoil. Maybe I need that fire to show me just what is from the Lord and how much of it has been from the work of my own hands. Maybe that is how I let go. Just let the Lord be the all consuming fire and reduce my life to ashes.
Maybe I just hand my life with all of my relationships over to the Lord and watch them burn. I know this sounds pathetic and even just a little bit sadistic but I need to know how much my own hands have labored this year and ask God to take away all of my work and just rely on what He has done because it is front of Him that I kneel and not in front of my own works.
So I think that letting go means to no longer worry what the future holds for myself and those around me (which is a challenge because I worry so much I won’t sleep for days), I think it means doing a lot of asking the Lord to guide me step by step and being okay with sitting and waiting while He tells me which way to go. I think it means not getting so attached to what is going on and how I am feeling and getting more attached to what God is doing (or not doing). And I think that perhaps (duh) it means putting more of my energy in to my relationship with God and letting Him do all the talking in to those relationships instead of me and just trusting that all the joys and pain and sorrow and surprise comes with a purpose. I think that is how you let go. I hope that is how you let go, because I have been asking the Lord to become that all consuming fire.
I desire intimacy with the Savior more than anything and I hope that by trusting Him in this I will find that my feet are planted on solid ground. May I give it all up to Him because I don’t want to be led astray by this world any longer.