Let Go

“Let go”—just two little words with so much meaning.  But what do they really mean?  Like Janus, the Roman god with two faces—one facing the future and one facing the past, these two-faced little words taken singly do seem to say opposite things.  “Let” or “allow” goes one direction, like it’s coming towards you, and “go” or “leave” goes the other, away from you.  But you ought to be able to put these little words together to mean something like, “to allow to leave.”  But somehow that just doesn’t do it.  “Let go” is an idiom whose figurative whole is greater than the sum of its literal parts. 

So “let go” means far more than it would appear.  To be sure, the meaning of this little idiom comes with some negative cultural baggage.  Try explaining that you were “let go,” or that when you were sick, you “let” your housework or yardwork “go.”  Or try explaining an impulsive purchase where you just “let go” (to some, that’s a positive thing).  But even in a negative context, these little words can have a positive connotation.  If two children are tussling for the same toy and one says, “Let go!” he’s holding his ground and not letting people push him around.  Who remembers that annoying little commercial of days gone by, “Leggo my Eggo?” 

For many of us, these little words have a positive memory, even when it was painful.  I used to have a beautiful horse poster that said, “If you love something, set it free; if it comes back to you, it’s yours.  If it doesn’t, it was never meant to be.”  So “let go” means emotional freedom.  Then there’s the well-meaning cliché, “Let go and let God,” that promises spiritual freedom, but if you’ve never quite figured out what it meant, that’s probably because you spotted more of piety than of practicality in any formula that reduces life’s problems to just five words. 

Ironically, it’s the promised positive outcomes of “let go” that get us into a lot of trouble sometimes.  If you’ve come to the same conclusion I have, that decluttering your life doesn’t quite work except in a YouTube video, you have sat down and regretted some of your violent purging that may have felt ecstatically freeing at the time.  The elation of a clean and tidy house is indeed freeing, but then you’re in bondage to keep it all up.  I used to teach a satirical essay in AP Language that contrasted neat people with sloppy people, and the conclusion was a bit surprising:  neat people are so lazy, they just throw everything away!   

This much we know:  like Janus, the two faces of “let go” do imply a choice of confronting the past with the future.  And January seems like the best month for the purge, if you notice all the organizing videos that pop up on your phone.  The passion for a tidy house amid winter furnace dust seems almost overwhelming—until the task itself becomes overwhelming.  “Let go,” comes to mock us, after all.  Then we’re back to our confusion with these two-faced little friends grown enemies.  It’s a love-hate reality we live with, and no wonder we get confused.  Like peering into a kaleidoscope of mingled regret and relief, it can feel like we never see life the same way twice—but that, in all our confusion, we let go what we should have kept and keep what we should have let go.

But there’s one more sneaky little clue inside this idiom, and that is the word, “let.”  It points to something just waiting to happen or to something that wants to happen or will happen if you “allow” it.  It’s meeting you halfway and wants your permission to “go.”  Jesus said, “Let your light shine,” which tells me that, unless I block it somehow, it’s going to shine—if the light of Jesus is in my life.  So, if “let” is really, after all, a very natural thing, then sooner or later, I will be able to “let go”—when it’s time, and what feels like a purging crisis was really just meant to be.    

My most recent purging crisis did not begin with a conscious decision.  During the summer of 2023, while I was cleaning my kitchen, moving out my little oak table, sweeping the floor, and rearranging my countertops, I was suddenly overwhelmed with a burden to pray for my brother.  I often pray as I work, but this was different.  This burden buckled me to my knees, and down I went right where I was standing, kneeling at my hard ladderback chair on the hardwood floor.  Almost before I had lowered both knees, I began sobbing.  All the sheer tragic pathos of my brother’s broken life gushed out of me with a force I cannot express.      

His health had taken a dramatic turn after he had fallen in his apartment and lain on the floor for two days before being discovered.  He was now in a nursing home dealing with dementia as a result of his long deprivation of food and water, and it is by God’s mercy alone that he even survived.  The fact that he did gave me the tenacious hope to pray all the more earnestly that he might even yet be saved.  He had been missing from our lives for almost 23 years, not long before this, and had moved from Texas to Tennessee in hopes of starting a new life that never came.  And as I wailed out the bitter waste of my brother’s life, my own pain began rushing out of me—pain I had not fully realized I possessed.    

One after another, all the broken things that had accumulated in my broken heart in the six years since the deaths of my parents six months apart came pouring out to the Lord far deeper than I even knew was possible.  Deeper and deeper and deeper I felt the releasing go as I seemed to see my whole life from a bird’s-eye view.  I didn’t think about the hardness of the floor on my knees, for I distinctly felt as if I was sobbing across the lap of my Savior, and I knew He was holding me up and comforting me through the very surrender of my tears.  “Cast thy burden upon the Lord, and He shall sustain thee” (Psalm 55:22).  Sustain me He did, and with every new burden I uncovered, the Lord seemed to beam upon me, “Just let it go.”

And, amazingly, I did.  I let go of my burden; I let go of my grief; I let go of my guilt for letting go of my grief!  My fear, loneliness, depression, anger, disillusionments, disappointments—I let all of them go.  I even let go of my dreams that had gone so stale across the intervening years.  Most of all, I let go of myself.  It isn’t that I had not done this before.  I had, many times, beginning when I was twelve years old.  But somehow, they were all different “selves,” and I had never let go of this one.  It usually takes a crisis to force us to admit that we must surrender what we can no longer hide—for the pain of even one yesterday is too great to bear.  How often do we try to carry them all!  And so, the desert sands of grief seep into our souls, and we become parched and weary—and also strangely empty—until this emptiness overflows in paroxysms of tears. 

I have no idea how long I knelt at my kitchen chair.  “Come unto Me,” Jesus says.  But how often do we really come?  This time, I really did.  I rested in my spirit as time stopped at the Throne of Grace, and I could have stayed there the rest of my life.  The stream of my sorrows became the river of Christ’s overwhelming love sweeping everything from me but Himself.  When I finally did stand to my feet, I realized that a whole lot more than my kitchen came clean that day.  A heart as full as it was light witnessed to my spirit that when I consciously “just let it go,” the Lord Himself filled my heart, and the clutter was gone.  

I may have lost other little things in my purges along life’s way, but that late-summer day in my kitchen, I found something so very old it seemed brand new:  I found Abraham’s mountain-altar at a hard ladderback kitchen chair.  And I’ll keep it for the rest of my life.   

Let’s study the things the Lord tells us to let go:

Proverbs 4:24; I Corinthians 5:13; Ephesians 4:22-31; Hebrews 12