Letting Go

“Sometimes you need to let go of the person you think you are, in order to become the person you are meant to be… But the letting go, as we must all learn from experience, isn’t just a simple choice between one way of being and another. Suffering is almost always part of it… Identities die hard. And new ones take shape slowly, in increments.” --- The Gift of an Ordinary Day

I’ve sensed a letting go in my own life… letting go of perceived control. Letting go of my carefully ordered world so that my hands are open to accept what God is desiring to give me. Letting go of past regrets, pain, and sin so that I can move forward to the new thing God is working in my life. Letting go of what could have been to leave room for what is yet to come! Letting go of the person I thought I was, the one I’d packaged to the world, in the belief that God has other plans for whom I’m meant to be! You see in order for God to do His new thing in my life, my hands must be empty! I can’t be holding onto my past thought patterns, fears, trappings, or masks! To let new in, we must train ourselves to let go.

And the old identities die hard; so we experience a type of grieving as we gradually let go. We are used to our masks and our fears; it is difficult and painstaking to peel them away from our truest self --- Who we are in Christ! We grieve the deception that we were in control because now we must face the truth that we never really were in control. We grieve what can never be ours, nor should it have been. The healing balm throughout the process is the fact that God is in control of that which we release to Him. We let go, He fills up! 

Letting go doesn’t mean withdrawing; it doesn’t mean we stop caring. It just means we are no longer controlled by our past, hurts, fears, and how others perceive us. We have let go in expectation that God will fill us with what is noble, pure, true, lovely, admirable, excellent, and praiseworthy. He will take the old, broken vessel of who we were and create a new life within. Our lives will still show the cracks and blemishes because the glory, after all, must go to the potter, not the pot! But because we allowed ourselves to let go, we are freed to be consumed with the Potter and the new thing He is doing in our lives.