Letting Go

I’m a hoader – of sorts. I don’t fill our house to overflowing and the things I save aren’t useless pieces of junk. They’re things that have meaning. As our children have grown up, I’ve been saving anything and everything that I was certain they would want to treasure and smile at as they had their own families – like every piece of school work they brought home, including every piece of work we completed during the years that I homeschooled them. I always planned on creating separate boxes for each child and separating everything by year, but since we have four kids close together in age, I was lucky to have one box per year that I tossed everything into as it came home! I know they’ll love me for it someday…

I also still have every note I passed during certain years of school. I thought it would be really important for me to be able to go back and read those as my kids were reaching that particular age. It would help me remember what it was like to be a 7^th grader or a freshman or other ages. I imagined myself sitting with my daughter someday, reading through the notes, laughing about how silly they seemed, while talking through how important that drama was at that time in my life and relating it to what she was going through right then. It was a beautiful picture in my mind…and one never acted upon in real life. In spite of that, those notes sit in a box somewhere with all of the other boxes we’ve stored in the basement because I’m still hanging onto them, unable to let them go.

Our lives can often be a picture of that, can’t they?  There are so many things we hang onto, believing we’ll want or need them someday and while they may not be kept in literal storage rooms, we tuck things away in our minds, preserving them and keeping them more fresh than any box ever could.

Minds are incredible things. It’s amazing to me to realize how much I’ve held onto and yet how much I’ve completely forgotten. I’ve blocked out whole portions of my growing up years because they were hard and I believe that my mind has protected me from remembering every little detail because of the pain it would bring.

Still, some of those things replay over and over in my mind as if I’ve put the film on repeated loop. You know what that’s like, right? Those are things that have been stored away for safekeeping that we then take out every now and again, view in our mind’s eye, memorize every detail (again) and sink into experiencing it over and over. When the memory is a good one, that can be a wonderful experience. When it’s painful, it’s something else entirely.

Sometimes, we’re completely blindsided by a memory that we’ve packed up and placed in a vault with higher security measures than would be found at Fort Knox. It has remained in that place, likened by some to an enclosed time capsule, completely untouched for years. When it’s dug up and unlocked, it can be as fresh and new as if it had just happened and the associated feelings can be almost unbearable.

At times, those things can be blown open, set off by a trigger device that we thought we’d kept out of reach. Then we’re left shell shocked by the breach of that which we thought had been securely locked away.

I believe that at other times and in God’s perfect timing, the Holy Spirit gently and kindly unlocks things within us that we’ve kept hidden away, and even forgotten about, because God wants us to experience the freedom found in letting those things go. He has the master set of keys to every lock and knows the combination to any safe ever created. Nothing is hidden from Him. He knows where we’ve buried it and out of His abundant love, He uncovers it, brings it out and offers us an invitation to be rid of it.

The hard part for us can be the letting go. Even in the most practical of terms, when we clean things out in our homes, it can feel painful to let go of things not needed or used because we have an attachment to them. It’s much the same way in letting go of the unseen things - we have an attachment to those things for any number of reasons. Maybe it’s due to shame. Maybe it’s because we’re protecting others. Maybe it’s due to fear of what others might think if they see our junk out at the curb. Maybe it’s simply due to the fact that we’re comfortable with it being where it is and it’s going to take too much effort to get rid of it.

Those things that we hang onto create clutter and eventually leave very little room for the things that we want to hold onto. Like items that are perishable, some things begin to rot, stink, and even decay the things nearest to them. Other things are held onto for so long that the boxes they’re held in begin to break down, toppling over and spilling out everything onto whatever is around them.

We need to let go of the things that we don’t need – things that bring us pain and warp our image of ourselves. Those things need to be removed so that they no longer clutter our thoughts and become such weighty burdens that they’re too heavy or too big to lug around. We don’t need them. They aren’t treasures and there’s no good value in them, even in the eyes of others.

The best way to unlock the vaults and unload the boxes is through the power of forgiveness offered to yourself and to others. While it’s not my intention to make light of it because it’s not a simple matter, it’s easier than you would think. Put simply, Jesus died on the cross on our behalf so that we might be forgiven when we had done nothing to earn that forgiveness. If He did that for us, who are we to not forgive ourselves or others?

It’s time to clean house. Use the power of forgiveness to loosen your grip and make the choice to let go.

You don’t need that stuff anyway.