This month has been a season ‘letting go’. Every item of furniture I lovingly and sometimes, painsteakinly, work upon, is eventually sold. Sometimes I try and think up a reason why it must stay. Like a chair I sourced recently. When I collected the chair from it’s owner, they look incredulous at me when I said it was beautiful. ‘Surely you’ll want to reupholster this one’, he said. Looking at it, I thought it was upholstered just the way I would like it. So I said not. To me, it was just perfect the way it was. The owner shook his head with a smile and went back into his house.
I took the little chair home and it looked so demure and pretty in the corner of my bedroom. Although it was listed to sell, I was beginning to be tempted to covet the chair. Yet before I could change my mind, the chair was swiftly sold and slipped out of my grasp.
Possessing, yet letting go.
Sourcing and caring with your heart, yet letting go with your head. Often in that time between the possessing and letting go, there is a state of wrestling. Excuses and reasons for why I shouldn’t let this one go.
However the lesson has been more far reaching and confronting as I’ve had to wrestle ‘letting go’ of more precious things. Teenage children who want to grow and have adventures, outside of my ‘control’. The wrestle is real and if it wasn’t for knowing that God is good and listens to my prayers, I would be a nervous wreck!
I’ve also been in a season of letting go of my own misplaced expectations. The idea my garden would be prepared and planted by now. The laborious tasks set before me of building raised beds and shovelling soil. Possibly taking up beekeeping again and all that entails. The previous precious years full of activity and productivity have been replaced with an exhaustion and lack of motivation.
But is it that, or am I just trying to replicate a season that has come and gone? Is this is a season of more universally letting go. Of my own striving and efforts. To be self sufficient is impossible. We must build a community of people who are wanting to reconnect with creativity and productivity. I am just not sure, right now, what that looks like for me. What can I achieve and what is realistic.
For now I am slowly planting seeds here and there. Tending to my young fig trees. Toying with the idea of building a raised bed. Lord give me vision and strength, so my efforts would be fruitful!
xxx