Isaiah 43:18-19
"Remember not the former things, nor consider the things of old. Behold, I am doing a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it? I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert."
Letting go...I don't like to let go. It scares me. I think letting go scares me because I fear I won't get back what I hope to keep close. That something will actually die in me and be lost forever if I let go...and everything will change.
Once I heard a story of letting go that reminded me that maybe I don't need to be so afraid. In the book Living Echoes, Pastor Rolf Hanson tells how he received a phone call from a farm house that a fatal accident had occurred. As he drove into the farm yard, he saw the farmer's wife sitting on the grass cradling her dead husband in her arms. It was corn harvesting time and the farmer had been jacking up the front of one of his wagon boxes so the picked corn would be easier to unload. He was known as a careful man, a good farmer, but the jack had slipped and crushed his head.
The harvest was to have been his last before retirement. He and his wife had been planning for years to make a trip or two and see the world. When Pastor Hanson went up to the wife, she looked up and said, "Pastor, I see nothing ahead of me but the cross!" But then she added, in what seemed like an after-thought, "But even God can do something about that!"
Even God can do something about that. Over the next few weeks, we will be sharing many moments in our lives of "letting go." Summer coming to an end. Our child beginning a new grade in school, or heading off to college. The start of Sunday School and confirmation. Maybe a wedding you have been preparing for, or a new job, a baby being bord, one we love taking their last breath...and we will find ourselves in that strange and awkward place of "letting go". Perhaps it will be that something in us will dies, and we will lose a part of ourselves that we may never get back again. But one thing we can cling to...because of God's promist of Easter and our God's passion of cherishing new life, we can be sure that God can even do something about the many things we will be letting go of too. Thanks be to God for that. Thanks be to God!
God's peace and strong presence be with you and your family as you let go and fully live in God's forgiveness, grace, and love.
Pastor Tim - Mission Developer for the Kettle River Cooperative