As we approach the Passover and Easter season, my thoughts as a mother turn toward another mother from two thousand years ago. A lady who lived in Nazareth, whose name was Mary. This mother stood at the foot of the cross watching her first born son, Jesus Christ, take on the sin of all mankind and take his final breath. Oh how her heart must have broken.
I have often wondered at what moment had she totally yielded her will as a mom over to God? Was it when Jesus was learning to walk and fell, or when he sat in the temple with the scholars, or when he fed five thousand from a few fish and loaves of bread? How she must have wanted to reach him as the crowds spat on him, the guards beat him and then hung him on a cross.
Through the years as she watched Jesus grow up and become independent from her care, did she have to continually remind herself that God is in control and that it’s only when she let go and let God handle things that true healing and hope can come from the ashes of despair?
The mistake many of us make in hanging on tightly to the reins of our lives – or the lives of others. True growth requires letting go.
True healing begins when we make the head-heart connection that we must “let go and let God” concerning all things, not just painful situations concerning our adult children. This kind of surrender doesn’t mean we are giving up, that we no longer care what happens to our adult children. On the contrary, it means we relinquish their care to a far greater and infinitely more powerful Caregiver. It means at last that we have come to the end of our own selfishness and can now see the possibilities available when we step out of the way of spiritual progress.
When the “letting go” part has been accomplished in our hearts and the “letting God” part becomes the focus of our lives, something amazing begins to happen: we feel free. We may not even realize how binding a prison our fears concerning our adult children had become until those fears are gone.
Yielding everything to God, total surrender, is something we must do daily. We open our hands and release those we love to Him.
Yielding to God may be something you do well – time and time again – and then if you are like most of us, you just as quickly “unyield” without even realizing.
Mary could have protected Jesus. She could have forbid him to go to the garden of Gethsemane… but she knew he had to fulfill his own destiny. We have to let our children experience pain and suffering to let them become the people God wants them to be – sometimes we have to let them choose their own course.
©2008, Allison Bottke
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