Open hands

Since this post, God has been teaching me how to hold the things I love. Though I think the saying is silly, I’ve prescribed to the “A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush” philosophy most of my life. When I get something good, I want to hold on to it. I want to clutch it, to bring it in to myself and never let it go.

That hasn’t been good for me. It hasn’t helped me grow. It has meant that change is hard, because I struggle to let go of what I have when I’m being offered other things. It has meant that it is hard for me to live in the present, because I worry about what I don’t have anymore but also about what might be taken away and about what good things that I want that may not come to me. It makes me anxious because I concern myself with how I can get what I want and hold on to what I have. It makes me fear because I struggle to see my life without the things I have.

The clutching protected me somehow, or at least it felt like it did. It felt like it kept me from having to be disappointed, crushed, devastated, though I’m not sure it did any of those things. Instead, it may even have made them worse, made it harder for me to let go when things didn’t turn out the way I thought they would or the way I wanted them to. But I have felt like I was protecting myself, like the only way to hold on to things was to hold them tightly and refuse to let them go.

But now? Now “open hands” are the words of the day. Dave is up for a job that could be really, really good for us. There are drawbacks (it doesn’t allow us to move from Southern California in the forseeable future), but they don’t outweigh the benefits. We want this job. We want this job more than we’ve wanted anything together (except for the wedding day to just GET HERE, already!). And yet, we can’t do a whole lot about it. We can’t make the decision, and we have no idea who he’s up against for it. We want to clutch it, but we can’t. We have to let hold it with open hands. We have to let it go if that’s what’s right.