It’s always about relinquishing. It’s always about opened hands and broken hearts, and admitting that God knows better, because that’s our only option to accept. Such an admission comes from a place of desperation and dependence. It is forced by cold shoulders of realities that we wished were only bad dreams at best, night-terrors at worst. But just because my state is a product of being forced into concession doesn’t make it wrong.
It’s always about relinquishing. It’s about making plans and thinking ideas… it’s about wanting things our way only to have God ask us to give it up. Not because He’s a bully (or so I would like to hope in His defense), but because supposedly, He has something different and better in store. And hope…. Hope is the chain, sometimes the only chain, that ties my motivation and sanity to this earth. If one day I lose hope in what is promised to me, if I lose hope that no matter what happens, there is a God who has assured me of a resurrection and vindication, that will be the day I cease seeing purpose in suffering and pain.
Relinquishing. Relinquishing the dreams that we hold to, the form manifested by our desire for completion and wholeness… it is not the hope for completion that is relinquished, but our conceptualization of it… the idol we have fashioned out of what was deemed, “Very good.” It’s always about relinquishing.
I walked slowly today, in the face of the wind and snow and decided to feel every cold prick sweeping across my exposed skin. Our God is a strange God, one who allows things to break before they are reconstructed, calls us to relinquish every part of our lives, especially the deepest parts, if we are to keep it. What a difficult teaching indeed.
How long, O Lord, do we need to have faith in an ideal before we taste its actualization? And even when we are given it, ironic that I still have to remember, “The Lord gives and the Lord takes away. May the name of the Lord be praised.”
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