My friend tells the story of when she was just a young teenager, she entered her pet calf into her local county fair. He was was her prize and was usually very calm. But on the day of the showing, as she led him into the arena a loud noise startled him and he bolted! Holding on tight to the lead strap, the calf drug her across the floor. My friend could hear the shouts, “Let go, Let go” but she hung on until she was spent, ultimately leaving her with scrapes and scratches, along with a bruised ego.
There’s an expression ‘let go and let God,’ and while I love the idea, sometimes my human-ness overrides good sense and I hold onto those feelings of betrayal, anger, frustrations or other negative thoughts or memories, that taunt me. It seems regardless of the battering my emotions take, releasing that tether seems impossible.
One friend describes her ‘tether’ as a wound created by someone close to her with not just an untruth, but a lie. The pain remains some days, she admitted, as she misses the relationship, but knows only God can change hearts. It’s not only hard to ‘let go’ but to have the patience that allows God to work out the details where there is eventual reconciliation.
I have no idea how a reconciliation would even look like in this kind of circumstance. It’s easy to say, ‘forgive and forget’ or ‘wounds heal’ or even ‘time changes everything’ and that may be true. But I think, depending on the depth of the wound it could take some time to come to the place where our hearts don't hurt just to think of such an incident. It becomes a very taunt tether! Only through the peace of God can we get through challenges like these, so we can come to a place of forgiveness.
There comes a time when we have to allow God to heal our hearts, and until we reach the place where our hearts can forgive, we are challenging our spiritual relationship with God. God says to forgive and when we look at the cross and his example, we can clearly see forgiveness changes everything. I’m not suggesting it’s easy; it can actually be very painful, but when we remember the cross, it helps put it in perspective.
I heard the idea of ‘letting go’ can be aided by a visual like using a rock as the lump sum of all those ‘things’ burdening us with guilt or other negative feelings, and toss it into a lake. Or we could write each one of those burdens, guilt feelings or whatever it is we need to release, onto a piece of paper and burning them.
Perhaps you have a visual different from these, and if so, please share. I doubt there is a single person who couldn’t benefit from these literal expressions of ‘letting go.’
Even if you don’t use the literal example of ‘letting go’ when we can surrender to our forgiving Lord and Savior, all our negatives thoughts and feelings; hurtful things and betrayals in our lives which tend to darken our day ---we will experience a freedom we didn’t think possible.
I encourage you to prayerfully bring anything that has ever broken your heart to our faithful Lord and allow Him to heal your wounds. You’ll be amazed at the difference it makes.
Photo credit: https://depositphotos.com/stock-photos/hand-holding-rope.html
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