How to Hold Your Life Loosely

“You must learn to hold everything loosely…everything. Even your dear family. Why? Because the Father may wish to take one of them back to himself, and when he does, it will hurt you if he must pry your fingers loose.” ~Corrie ten Boom

I used to hold on to things long after I needed to let them go. Dreams. Goals. Relationships. Even places. If you live with any level of intensity, if you’re any kind of a visionary, this is an easy habit to fall into and an equally difficult one to break.

We don’t like to surrender, do we? We want to be able to say, “I am ___________. This is who I am, and this is what I do” with confidence. We tend to be too quick to identify ourselves, our paths, our people, our callings, our stuff. We name it and claim it, and then when it’s time to surrender it, we falter. No one sees this, of course, because we fight tooth and nail to stay the course, even when the well has dried up and the road has become all but impassable. We grit our teeth and hang on.

Until God forces us to move.

When I was twenty-three, I would have told you I knew exactly who I was and where I was going. I knew where I was going to grow old, who I was going to be married to, what my career was going to look like. I would not have told you, though, that those things had begun to feel like they weren’t the right path. I had neither the strength nor the courage to admit it, because then I would have had to give it all up. I would have had to relinquish my identity. And that would have felt like a failure of some kind. Like admitting I was wrong about the most elemental thing–about who I was.

Then, in one day,  everything fell apart. Surprisingly, once the shock wore off, it wasn’t how I’d imagined it would be. For the first time in my young life, I didn’t know exactly who I was or where I was going. I couldn’t tell you what defined me anymore. It was earth-shaking.

It was also freeing.

Slowly, as the crisis began to recede into the past a day at a time, a week and a month at a time, I began to loosen my hold on the rest of my life, on my identity. I found room to dream new dreams, courage to try new people and places. As I did, I discovered God had other things in store for me–things I would never have imagined or chosen if left to my own devices. I began to see that I could trust God more than I could trust myself.

What I’m getting at here is that while letting go might look and feel like a loss or a defeat, it’s not. [Tweet “Letting go means you provide an opportunity for God to move.”]I don’t mean God wants us to walk out when things get hard–that’s not it. What I do mean is that sometimes, God allows us to become uncomfortable because he has something he’s trying to show us, something that will change our lives for the better, even though it might not look that way on the surface. He wants us to loosen our stranglehold on the things we have (wrongly) made a core part of our identity–a job that doesn’t make the most of our gifts, a toxic relationship that brings us false security, the house we are afraid to sell, the loss we are afraid to heal from.

Just a few years after I was forced to let go of the-me-that-was, I dumped a career of ten years because it stopped feeling right. I’d learned to recognize the feeling–some people call it holy discontent–that I was supposed to get on a different road. This time, the letting go was less scary. I’d learned not to hold things too tightly. I’d learned to live with possibility in the palm of my open hand.

What are you holding onto today, friends? And might God be asking you to loosen your grip so he can move in your life?

Harmony Harkema has loved the written word for as long as she can remember. A former English teacher turned editor, she has spent the past seven years in the publishing industry. A novelist and blogger in the fringe hours of her working mom life, Harmony also has a heart for leading and coaching aspiring writers. Harmony lives in Memphis with her car-loving husband and two small daughters. She blogs at harmonyharkema.com.

Photograph © Bethany Beams, used with permission