"Eels are like women...

... if you try to hold them down, they'll just get away."

It's a quote from an obscure show called Samurai Champloo. I don't suppose too many of you have caught Eels before... I won't bore you with the details. But that idea is a manifestation of something that I'm learning, namely, living life with open hands.

Job says, "The Lord gives, and the Lord takes away. May the name of the Lord be praised." And later, when his wife tells him to curse God and die in his misery, he responds, " Shall we accept good from God, and not trouble?"

Perhaps it was Richard Foster who first brought this notion of praying with open hands as a reminder to how we are to live our lives. If we live with open hands, we are free to receive from God and free to give others what we have received. We are also free to give up the things in our lives, even the good things, that threaten to tweak God's will with our plans little by little until it hardly looks like His calling for us any more. By then, what we are clasping tightly to our chest will be a dull watered down rationalized selfish version of something that used to be Christ-centered and glorious.

I'm selfish and I'm sentimental. Blame it on Adam, blame it on culture, blame it on me, the fact remains. But with open hands... when we are faithful, it frees us from having remorse over the things and people we missed out on and allows to live fully in what He has given. It helps us recognize that we, being very broken little people in the world, cannot possibly control all that happens to and around us, but that we can with faith, hold out our open hands receiving from God what He has ordained and letting go of ourselves in the process. It inevitably teaches us to let go of our miserly dreams and habits.

It allows us, in a world full of problems that overwhelm us and pain that threatens to numb us, to listen and obey what the Lord has called us to, where He has called us to it, in the timing He has called us to, and in the strength He supplies, no matter how small or how large of a task it might be.

There is freedom in that to finally breath deeply. I don't suppose something like that comes overnight. It's not so much a single act as it is a way of life.

Thank God for grace.