I refuse to give them up, saying, "But it's mine, God. It isn't fair that this person gets to keep their pride, or that this person gets to thrive, or that this person can do this...how come I have to be the one who has to change?" And more and more God reminds me that everything I have isn't mine. Everything was given to me, but not for the sole purpose of fulfilling my needs. Instead, everything was given to me so that I would learn how to take care of them and produce fruit in order to serve the needs of others - the same way He was caring for us. And as I was doing so, what I truly needed would be fulfilled.
So He's been teaching me what it means to hold things loosely in my hand, because everything I have is not mine and He gives and takes away and grows things for the good of those who love Him.
But at the same time I feel like I've been holding on to things so loosely that I haven't been caring for them as much as I should be. I feel like to a certain extent I've fallen a little too far the other way that I've neglected quite a few things I've been entrusted with.
And that scares me.
It scares me enough to do something about it. It's just...that's the hard part - figuring out what God actually wants me to do or gaining to courage to actually do it.
Some excerpts from Henri J.M. Nouwen's book, Reaching Out: The Three Movements of the Spiritual Life:
The movement from loneliness to solitude can make it possible to convert slowly our fearful reactions into a loving response.
As long as we are trying to run away from our loneliness we are constantly looking for distractions with the inexhaustible need to be entertained and kept busy.
But it seems of great importance to know with an experiential knowledge the difference between an action that is triggered by a change in the surrounding scene and an action that has ripened in our hearts through careful listening to the world in which we live.
The movement from loneliness to solitude should lead to a gradual conversion from an anxious reaction to a loving response.
Don't we often look at the many events of our lives as big or small interruptions, interrupting many of our plans, projects and life schemes? And doesn't this unending row of interruptions build in our hearts feelings of anger, frustration and even revenge, so much so that at times we see the real possibility that growing old can become synonymous with growing bitter?
But what if our interruptions are in fact our opportunities, if they are challenges to an inner response by which growth takes place and through which we come to the fullness of being? What if all the unexpected interruptions are in fact the invitations to give up old-fashioned and out-moded styles of living and are opening up new unexplored areas of experience? And finally: What if our history does not prove to be a blind impersonal sequence of events over which we have no control, but rather reveals to us a guiding hand pointing to a personal encounter in which all our hopes and aspirations will reach their fulfillment?
Then our life would indeed be a different life because then fate becomes opportunity, wounds a warning and paralysis an invitation to search for deeper sources of vitality.
Then indeed we can break out of the prison of anonymous series of events and listen to the God of history who speaks to us in the center of our solitude and respond to his ever new call for conversion.
As I'm trying to figure out what it means to hold things loosely without neglect, all I know for sure is that I should cling tightly to is His Word, His truths, and His love.
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