Letting go while holding on

I really enjoy reading Anne Lamott's books. She wrote a funny book about motherhood called "Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son's First Year" which makes every mother feel so much better about their own first months of survival with an infant. She also wrote 3 books on faith - her own thoughts on faith, with her quirky humor and honest vulnerability.



So, in her book, "Grace (Eventually)", she writes about the wailing wall in Jerusalem and of the process of writing prayers and worried on paper and placing them in the wall. Of pouring your heart out to God and letting go. She, in her own daily life, will put prayers on bits of paper and shove them in little places - her desk drawer, boxes, her car's glove compartment. It helps her to write down the worries to release the burden of trying to solve the problems. I can just imagine her glove compartment stuffed with little bits of paper, people's names or worries of the day written on them.



She wrote "when you're not siphoned into the black hole of worried control and playing fretful Savior, turning the problem over to God or the elves in the glove compartment harnesses something in the universe that is bigger than you and that just might work."



I've experiences the waves of being siphoned in the black hole of worry lately and it's just not as fun as, say, riding Space Mountain through black holes at Disney! No sirree!



"Letting go" helps.



Letting go by writing a blog helps.

Letting go by giving some of the burden to God, to doctors, to the air by screaming, to family and friends who lend their ears...it helps.





Read Anne Lamott!!