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From Certified Life Coach Dixie Diamanti, Author of Climbing Out of the Box and Fifty Ways to Meet Your Lover:
Actively letting go is a little more pro-active than when you are forced to let go.
- It’s a practice.
- It’s being awake.
It can bring great relief.
Except for the agony of it!
It is not the same as “passively letting go.” Like when you have no choice…..whereby life rips stuff out of your grip, or you paint yourself into a corner, or life gets suddenly interrupted by a sudden loss.
I’m talking about a decision to let go of something that only Jesus can heal or take care of.
- We are not saviors. He is!
5 Things I know by experience about actively letting go:
- There’s always more to let go of. Our life is a journey of surrender. The sooner we realize we are not the fixers the sooner we are released from the burden of trying to figure it all out. And sometimes we have to let go of the same thing 100 times or more.
- Letting go is painful– in varying degrees, and it is going to stretch you until you feel pain. It leaves an emptiness, a place that the thing took up, that you then have to ask Jesus to fill up for you.
- When you find the strength in your spirit to be tough enough to let go, you cross over a sacred line.
And on the other side, His tenderness is waiting for you for He has just been waiting for you to release it, (or them, or whatever it is that you were holding onto).
- Baby steps are okay, but you can’t avoid the pain that surfaces when you commit to the letting go and the longer you wait the longer it takes to see Him fixing the thing you had a vice grip on.
- Acceptance is obedience and obedience means intimacy with the One who stands there waiting patiently for you to get there.
When you just accept that the pain of letting go is part of the deal, your let-go wound will heal faster.
I’ve surrendered to the endlessness of it. And it’s a resolution that softens my spirit. It is a solution of surrender…which means growth and trust and intimacy with the One that I trust to handle it all for me; the things out of my control…
Where I got in the way!
- Deep, deep, deep in my soul, beneath limits of time, and fantasies, and things I “captured” along the way that I thought I could fix, is the freedom that has been pulling me forward my whole life. Forward right into His lap.
- Trust is deeply rooted in how Father feels about us. Jesus wanted us to know that he does not withhold his glory or make us earn his favor. We’re his dearest friends! He wants us to experience the fullness of his life, and the best way we do that is to be learning to relax and let go of our need to control our own lives and define security on our own terms.
- People who fuss, grab and manipulate simply don’t understand how God works. What a statement! I had no idea that my anxieties were the best evidence that I had simply not learned how God works. Because I didn’t trust him to bring into my life all that I needed to walk in him, I had to scheme and labor to try and get it for myself.
- And even when that doesn’t work, we don’t consider that our approach to God is flawed, only that we’re not working hard enough. So instead of giving up and learning to let go, we have to try even harder.
- Jesus is inviting a new generation of his followers to learn how to live dependent on the awesome love of his incredible Father. Isn’t it interesting that we have built most of our religious institutions on the fear that we can’t trust him to lead his people and therefore must provide programs and rituals to make people feel secure? Unfortunately we end up spending more energy building substitutes for people to trust in instead of equipping them to fully trust him.
Gazing into His eyes with my spirit, even though each and every time it is like cutting off an appendage, I let go of my priceless treasures that is outside my control and give it all to Him.
So I’m still shedding — taking deep breaths and actively letting go. I’m not waiting until I’m ready to let go. I’ve waited long enough. Carried stuff long enough. Longed long enough.
For that tender place, dancing with Him, on the other side of courage.
And you know what? In each and every case after actively letting go I have found the reality of truly living by faith….for He has never let me down.
And I have delightfully discovered that He does a much better job of fixing than I can.
So, take a deep breath, and as an act of faith, share with me those things you have truly let go of too!