Letting Go

1 Peter 1:17-23

For me, fall is a bittersweet time of year. I love the majesty of the season. The crisp days, the beauty of the foliage delight me. Yet when I watch the trees shed those leaves, my heart feels challenged. I have never been good at letting go and yet I see that played out by creation as I gaze out my windows.

Jesus addresses letting go, telling the disciples not to be afraid to give up their very lives. Matthew 16:25 quotes Jesus saying, “For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.”

Nature shows us a lot about aspects of our lives. Everyone ever born will probably face loss, a time of letting go. I remember letting go when my boys started kindergarten, and the bigger act of letting go when they left for college. Many of us face great moments of loss when we let go of grandparents, parents, aunts and uncles, cousins, spouses or children. The very foundation of our lives is shaken. Everything we had, everything we ever thought we wanted, is gone.

In these circumstances it seems there are no anchors to steady us, no safety nets to catch us: only God, only the Holy Spirit, to lead us through a world which we feel has little place for us at all.

Loss of any kind is a shocking, numbing thing that seems to freeze us at the onset. Loss changes life at the roots. What was once the center of a life—perhaps a person, a position, a lifestyle, or a plan—is no more.

Loss destabilizes the most organized, sophisticated of us. It is the habitual that dies with every death. To be left without the mainstay of life is to be plunged into questioning the rest of it.

As we turn to God and begin relying on His wisdom and strength, things begin to shift and reshape. Loss, completely absorbed, can be a precious gift. The person we were before is not the same. In many ways we become something new. There is more God in us. There are spiritual lessons to be learned from loss that can barely be learned in any other way. One thing we see, when we think we have nothing, is that we still have ourselves. We have gifts of God in abundance, never noticed, never touched, and waiting to be tapped. And whatever we have developed in the center of ourselves is now ready to be mined like gold, shaped and shined into a whole new life.

Sometimes only loss releases the wealth of the accumulated self. Sometimes only loss requires the concentration that brings us to our best. Left without the security of the past, we are forced to stand alone, to find what it takes to bear the unbearable. This is perhaps when we fully trust that the God who made us has never and will never leave our sides. When loss comes, our creating God comes to us in new and demanding ways so that we can finish the creation that He has begun in us.

None of us is one thing only. We are all a medley of possible beginnings. The pain of loss lies in the fact that we so seldom realize the fullness of ourselves until the rest of our life lies in the ashes of the past. The Word of God becomes new life to us. Then life becomes a series of possibilities which make us whole.

The wonderful, short book of Ruth in the Bible emphasizes God’s invitation to development. The story begins in tragedy with three women left without their husbands and with no means of support. It’s a moment that leads these three women to God’s new time: Naomi, Orpha, and Ruth are alone in the world now. They have only one another. And God.

As we let go, creation goes on creating in us. Given new horizons, we become new people. We do things we never did before. We see things we never saw before. We think new thoughts and dream new dreams. We begin to walk away from one life toward another. We bloom again.

Our views out each of our windows will change. We’ll lose the vibrant leaves we have seen the past few weeks. We know there will be stunning winter days that take our breath away. There will be winter days that challenge us. That is how I see much of what we face as we journey through our lives here on earth echoed in nature. We know that as we let go of the beauty of fall to experience the bleakness that winter can be, we will see creation bloom again when the early days of spring warm the earth once again. And we can be certain that our Lord walks beside us every day, through every season.