The Slow Way: The Practice of Letting Go
Surrender is the work of naming my weaknesses and allowing them to drag me to the love of God, where I am fully known, and fully myself, with or without my abilities, usefulness, or performance.
One of my older boys has a standing activity every Thursday night at 7, twenty minutes away. In the last month of driving him, I’ve missed the exit, gotten turned around, or simply forgotten to notice where we were as we drove. This happened three out of four weeks. The last time we arrived late, I made a decision that I should no longer be driving him to this particular activity. Chris is taking this one over.
Here’s the thing: I balance a lot of tasks every day—moving from my writing work to my youth ministry work, from specialized therapeutic interventions for my youngest son to teenage angst and middle school algebra. And I’m grateful I can make those moves. I’m also grateful that most of the cognitive functioning challenges I faced after my concussions in 2019 have eased. But still there are things I lost that may never come back. Oddly, making clear decisions while driving is one of them. Don’t get me wrong. I haven’t been in a car accident since 2011; I’m not a danger on the road. It’s taking the right exit. It’s brain fog. It’s an inability to talk and make a directional decision at the same time. I simply don’t multitask while driving very well these days.
Brains are amazing and tender and mine has changed. Not massively. I’m grateful my personality is the same. I laugh at the same jokes and, while not quite as quick as I used to be, I can still crack my own. But my brain doesn’t hold all the words it used to hold. They escape me often. I wrote much of Blessed Are the Rest of Us with a google tab open so I could quickly type in the question: What is the word that means __? These days my thinking and reacting is different than it used to be, and at only 44, maybe I’m learning to accept this at an earlier age than most. It’s humbling to admit that I’m not completely trustworthy to get my kid to his Thursday night commitment on time. Or that I can’t keep up with all the tasks I used to. I don’t “make it look easy” anymore.
What do we do with our own weaknesses? What does it mean to embrace our limits with gentle acceptance, even if it aches to do so?
I’ve been listening to a song called “Lake Coatepeque” on The Brilliance’s newest album Feel It. Its lyrical simplicity moves me every time I listen. It’s a wisdom song, instructions on how to live well, instructions on how to say goodbye:
Use all your tears and all your pain
With the softness of a sculptor
And if you make a big mistake
Have the courage to start over
Never give up on the people that you love
And know this life is learning to let go
Is it true that “this life is learning to let go”? I’m certain that the longer we live in a world propelled by time, wisdom will teach us the work of surrender. We who get to live long enough to age will be invited more and more deeply to the practice of learning to let go. This season of Epiphany—the illumination of light in the darkness—is fitting for that reminder. We humans exist within time, and because we are bound to time, we must learn to surrender to its movement in our lives.
In his book For the Life of the World, Alexander Shmemann suggests that “all philosophy, all religion, is ultimately an attempt to solve ‘the problem of time.’”
Is time a problem to be solved? Shmemann explains that, “through time we experience life as possibility, growth, fulfillment, as a movement toward a future. Through time, on the other hand, all future is dissolved…By itself time is nothing but a line of telegraph poles strung out in the distance and at some point along the way is our death.”
FUN!!!!
I bet you hoped to show up here and read about your life as outstretched telegraph poles, one of which is your death!
Okay, so let’s take this image: the outstretched telegraph poles of time. What does it mean for us to practice the kind of faith that takes this reality—that we are all humans living in a moment of time—and allows that knowledge to shape our encounters with the Creator of time itself?
How do we live as though “this life is learning to let go?” Letting go, as I am learning the practice at this point in my life, is staring our weaknesses in the face, choosing humility, and embracing our belovedness in the midst of those very real weaknesses.
When I worry about missing my exits or forgetting words in a career where remembering words is my literal job, my instinct is to jump to a future I fear. If I can’t do this small task now will I be reliable to the people I love in twenty years? Will I be a grandmother who can’t help out when my kids need me? Will my brain be that much weaker, unable to do the writing and speaking I long to do with my life?
And even those thoughts require surrender. Embracing my weaknesses means reminding myself that I cannot control my body, but I can love her, whatever she decides to do or be for me as I move closer and closer to the telegraph poles in the distance. I am only this human body and soul—beloved by God— and present in this space and time. Surrender is the work of naming my weaknesses and allowing them to drag me to the love of God, where I am fully known, and fully myself, with or without my abilities, usefulness, or performance.
Surrender is part of the story of wholeness. Surrender is the way we lean into hope, remembering that we are not good because of what we can do. We are good because to be human is to be a created, creative soul, capable of loving and being loved.
It’s how the Psalmist was able to write: “I will sing to the LORD as long as I live; I will sing praise to my God while I have being.” While I am what I am – human, here in the reality of time — I will offer myself to the care and keeping of Love.
Later, in his same chapter called “The Time of Mission,” Schmemann explains the work of surrender as coming into the presence of Christ “to offer Him our time.” In that surrender time itself becomes full of Christ’s very own self, who “heals it.”
How does Christ heal it?
I submit to CS Lewis in Mere Christianity for this one: “If you picture Time as a straight line along which we have to travel, then you must picture God as the whole page on which the line is drawn. .. God, from above or outside or all round, contains the whole line, and sees it all.”
And if God contains the entire line of time and sees it all, then we are never far from the healing work of God’s love—which holds the very telegraph poles in an already-there, already-loving hand.
A Slow Practice
Let’s use our imaginations to pray today, starting with a big deep breath. In and out.
Close your eyes and begin to imagine a big page of butcher paper spread across a table. Imagine a long row of tiny 3D telegraph poles popping up along that butcher paper. Imagine them like a sketch come to life, popping up and out of the page. Now place your tiny illustrated self on that illustration. In other words, you’re a 3D image on the page, much smaller than the sketched 3D telegraph poles. As you walk toward one pole, you can see a long line of poles in the distance. You are small on this sketch of time. And you are always moving along it.
Now imagine the butcher paper is longer on both sides than the table where your tiny illustrated self is walking. An endless rolled out sheet of poles—behind and ahead of you. Your tiny walking body stops and bends down to touch the ground you walk on. That paper—the sheet on which the poles are drawn, the ground you stand on—isn’t ground at all. It’s the One who is beyond time, beyond your small life, who holds you and the poles up.
What do you feel about this?
What comes to mind when you imagine your life this way?
What do you imagine God wants to say to you about what it means to be the paper on which the line of time is drawn?
What do you imagine God wants to say to you about your weaknesses here in the midst of time?
Close with this prayer: Like the Psalmist, Lord, teach me to number my days, that I may gain a heart of wisdom.
A Note:
Just a reminder about the zoom soul-care workshop “Embracing Our Limits, Discovering Our Wholeness,” which I’ll be leading February 24 for my paid subscribers in preparation for the release of Blessed Are the Rest of Us this April. If you’re interested in being part this workshop along with the Blessed Are the Rest of Us book club I’ll be hosting this spring, consider becoming a paid subscriber for $5 a month. I offer the Slow Way letter free every week, so this is a way of supporting my work!
Also, you can preorder the book right now at Baker Book House, where it’s 40% off the price of other booksellers. The first 200 preorders over there will receive a signed copy and a fun little gift from me!
This is exactly what I’ve been walking through for the past few years re life circumstances that aren’t what I would have chosen. Lately, it’s my body’s evidence of needed internal healing. It’s been a cycle of grief and surrender and acceptance, not always in that order. Thank you for sharing your vulnerabilities and weaknesses and learnings 💜