Yesterday we drove through the parking lot of one of my former employer’s stores. It sounds silly now, but for several years I would not even drive by one of their stores. I hadn’t thought about it until Lily reminded me.
How often do we cling to hurt feelings, grudges, attitudes, when Christ would say, “Let it go!” I’m guilty.
Maybe you think you’re right, even justified in how you feel. Maybe you are. Something dishonest, unjust, terrible happens to all of us. In God’s economy, we should let it go.
Charles G. Finney said,
“Look at someone who once had large property to manage and by some means lost it all, and that person goes about saying, I have sustained such and such great losses. We may profess that it belongs to God and even deceive ourselves into the belief that we are sincere, but when a loss occurs, it often shows us that we did not regard it as God’s, but our own.”
I often forget this. I say my wife, my family, my friends, my health, and yet none of these are mine. The experience is mine; the journey is mine, and most important to the heart of God, how I react or respond is mine, but the person, the relationship, the thing, is not mine.
In a world like ours, it can be difficult to hold things loosely, especially when someone breaks your heart, another strangles your throat and someone else has their hands in your pockets. It is hard to let go when you’ve invested almost thirty years in a marriage, home, career, business; but when we cling to our anger and resentment we only provide a home for the pain, making a bad situation worse.
“If only” and “What Might Have Been” are a fairy tale way of living. It is like lugging around a sack of old fruit. Very soon you smell, feel crawly and become an unpleasant person to be around. Whatever we lost was never really ours.
I have to constantly remind myself that everything I see, and hear, and taste, and smell and touch is temporary. These are not my possessions, things to put in a jar for some later, better time. The time is now. Life is now. When I regain that perspective, I lose it often, I am immediately grateful. Anxiety melts in the presence of a grateful spirit. When we learn to be grateful for the present, for today, for right now; depression and worry and the need to be distracted will lose their hold on us.
I’ve heard it said we come into this world with nothing and we leave with nothing. Don’t believe it. We leave with our journey intact. God knew us before we were born and God knows us after we die. Jesus said, “And remember, I am with you always.” Mat 28:20.
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