Holding On

I've come to the difficult decision that I need to let go of God. 

Something beautiful has been happening in me. Slowly, and almost without my noticing, I have been becoming the woman I've always wanted to be. Oh, I wouldn't have told you I would look like this, but who I am - my personality, my interactions, my spirit - it all feels so natural, so free. And what I've noticed is that all of this comes from this incredible place where God is touching me deeply. It's the natural outflow of being so close to Him. 

The trouble, as it's always been, I guess, is that once I get something good in my life, that's all I want. I want that goodness more than anything. I want always to live so casual, so natural, without all the stress of trying to be this thing. I could never work myself into being who I am when God is so near; I can only simply be that by nature of His presence. I cannot wake up and decide to be natural, as odd as it may sound. I just have to be that. 

But it's hard just to be. Once I've touched this thing, once I've experienced what it is to be so free in God, I want always to be that. So I reach out and try to grab onto it. I try to hold tightly to God so that I can always be so close, so that I can always be so free. But it doesn't work. The more I try to hold onto God, the more I feel like I'm forcing it. And when I'm forcing it, I'm nothing like I am meant to be. I'm nothing like the woman that I've come to deeply appreciate, the beautiful woman who has been hiding in me, waiting for God's presence to expose her and make her manifest, so she can make Him manifest. The harder I try to hold on, the more I feel myself slipping away.

So it's time to let go.

I don't really know how all of this works. It sound strange, even as I write it, to say that I must let go of God. But I know there is no other way. I'm holding too tightly to Him. I'm trying too hard. I'm so afraid of letting go that rather than embracing freedom, I have wrapped myself in chains. It's the very opposite of everything I have always wanted. And just as I understand this beautiful thing God is doing in me, I cannot ignore the horrible thing I am doing in myself. This horrible way I am coming against myself in trying to find myself. This horrible paradox that the more I want to be the woman I've discovered in me, the less I must try to be her. The tighter I want to hold her, the more I must let go. Because she only exists in the natural flow of things.

And this holding on is anything but natural.

It's striving. It's stressing. It's trying to create my own salvation. It's this attempt I'm making at creating in myself the woman I want to be, all while declaring that she has already been created. It's foolishness! If God has created this woman in me, then who am I to try to create her again? I can't. I must simply let her show herself, let her make her appearance. And the only way to do that is to simply let her come. 

She comes when I least expect her, when life is just life, when the days are just going by and there's this opportunity, this moment, and God is present, and I am present in my best possible self and it just flows out of me. It just seems to be this way. And every time - every. time. - I reach out my hands and try to take hold of the God that makes this possible. I never want to let go of this feeling of being beautifully created, wonderfully made, perfectly me; I never want to let go of the God who created, made, and perfected me. 

But I must. I have to. I have to let go. As odd, as backward, as weird as it sounds, I've come to the difficult decision that I have to let go of God. It's the only way. 

But this...this is also true: that I should find, in letting go of God, that it was never me who was meant to hold on to Him. It was always Him who has been holding on to me. 

And He is. And He always is.