Dexter Iowa Community Site

Consider this quote from Abe Lincoln

"America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves."

I’ve never been skydiving. It isn’t even something on my bucket list. The thought of stepping out of a perfectly good airplane with a sheet tied to my back scares the stuffing out of me. I’m not sure what it is about skydiving, or heights in general that just set my knees to knocking, my palms sweating and my heart into overload. It’s not the falling to my death part that scares me. People skydive all the time. Hundreds of thousands every year with less of a chance of having an accident then the chances each of us take when we buckle up and pull out of the driveway. So what is it? This question has been rolling around in my head this week and in my journals as I jot notes from time to time about life and the things around me.

It came to me just the other night as I was laying in bed and listening to the rain fall on the roof with it’s muffled pitter patter. It’s about letting go. Completely letting go and having no control. We humans have troubles with letting things go. It’s our nature to hold onto things, to try to be in control, to make sure that we aren’t hurt by the things around us.

Some things, material things we can’t let go of. Those old school papers, a scrap of a baby blanket, a photo, a letter from someone we once knew. They clutter our space and hide deep in the boxes, closets and files we’ve tucked them into, waiting patiently for the day when we’ll stumble across them and they will jog some feeling within us. There are even some of us who hold onto material things for no real reason whatsoever. We all know someone who saves, pack rats we call them. They save newspapers, plastic butter and cool whip containers, egg cartons, empty food tins. For some, they hold onto them in case they are needed someday, and for some they fill an empty spot by collecting more treasure than someone else, and in a way they find the collecting and saving as fulfillment for something else that they are missing.

There are also things that we hold onto that are unhealthy. That snide comment that someone made, perhaps regret over a mistake we made, a vision of ourselves as something we aren’t. Many things that we hold and mull over and fret about and in the end lead us to dark roads, dark choices and a feeling of emptiness. Sometimes it is the immaterial things that we hold onto that are in the end the hardest to let go of. We struggle with them. We carry them around late at night when everyone else is asleep, lost in our own tormented world of struggle and fear and depression over them. Why do we hold onto those things that bring us so much grief? What is it about those things that take normally well balanced individuals and turn them into walking shells of the person they used to be?

The self help industry is based on this very fact. Everywhere you turn you can find someone selling some program or a book written about any issue you are having because we think we can’t begin to find answers to letting go of things. We read the books, watch the programs, spend years in therapy and at the end of it all we look back at the things we couldn’t seem to rid ourselves of and wonder what kept us in such a miserable place for so long. It should be easy shouldn’t it? To not get phased by the crazy stuff that happens to us and that we bring upon ourselves. Shouldn’t it be as easy as giving up all those things to God and saying, “Ok big guy…here they are, and they are your problem now.” For some it is that easy, for others it’s a long hard road.

In many ways I believe that we hold onto things much longer than we need to. Both those things that are material and the immaterial things that clutter our lives. Maybe we need to look at them differently. Maybe instead of looking them as clutter we need to look at them as memories. Some good and some that we’d rather just forget. Perhaps in order to recover we need to do two things. First, we need to learn from the bad things that we hold onto. We need to put them in their proper perspective and not allow them to hang out in prominent places in our lives. Take what you have experienced, go through it, learn from it and put it away or get rid of it. Second, we need to replace that space with memories of the good things. The memories of our triumphs, of time with Grandmas and Grandpas when you are little, the warmth of that first spring sunshine, the gentle cry of a newborn. All those things that come through our lives and enrich it are the things we should hold onto and cherish and remember often.

Regardless of the trials you are going through; money problems, relationship issues or just a feeling that you aren’t really the person you expected to be, remember we are all children of God, we are all human, we fail sometimes and take a minute to look around at the things you do have and be thankful for them and fill your soul and all those empty spaces within you with butter and cool whip tubs full of them.

See you next week...Remember, we're all in this together.