The Greater Pain

There's a greater pain than in letting go.
It is in holding on.

When I was 14 my family moved to, well, my own personal utopia. My dad pastored a church there in my perfect town and to me, the congregation was full of angels. For the first time in my life I felt truly loved, accepted and at 14? That's huge.

But just two-and-a-half years later, we moved away. I nearly lost my mind. 

In our new town a couple hundred miles distant, I was terribly homesick and wrote letters by the box load. My goal in life became to move back to Utopia and graduate from high school there. Unfortunately, my parents wouldn't even listen to that request.

So in my new town I went to school and felt like a zombie. 

But eventually, God sent me a friend, the first truly best friend I'd ever known. We'd go to my house and I'd tell her all about the utopia I'd left behind and the angelic people there. She took that until one day when she asked, "Do you always have to talk about Utopia?"

Her words shook something from me. 

Call it a bondage, maybe. But from then on I stopped talking so much about Utopia and my friend and I went on to have remarkable adventures in this new town. Oh, she was fun! And exactly what I needed. Our escapades over the following seven months would have made a delightful book.

And that is just one story in my life where the pain of letting go was not as great as the pain I would have felt later if I'd held on.

There is pain in letting go and yet? It's not as hurtful as --


Being drastically homesick for a year or more.
Holding onto a relationship, a friend who depresses you.
Insisting upon eating junk food every day.
Spending money when we don't have it.
Neglecting our spouse for something else.
Holding onto your children when they are ready to live an adult life.
Wanting what God does not want us to have.


There's no finishing this life without doing loads of letting go, first. All changes require letting go in some form. 

But the amazing thing about God? Whenever He asks us to let go of something, He always replaces it with something better. All we need are the eyes willing to wait for--then recognize--that better thing when it arrives. 


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