Letting Go

I am such a hoarder. I have SMS’s from 2013! I realized this when my sghedlemba (Nokia C3) wouldn’t receive any messages because the storage was full. Before I could receive any new messages, I had to delete some old ones. This got me thinking. Sometimes we have a hard time receiving and keeping new things that new seasons in our lives bring us because we are still held up on past times.

When I read these texts from all those years ago, I felt loved, and warm and fuzzy inside, and I guess I kept them for so long because that’s how they made me feel the first time I read them. But I hadn’t come back to read them since, so me keeping them hadn’t been so useful after all. We hold on to things mostly because of the emotions we attach to them. If you’ve watched Clean House, you know what I’m talking about. People there hold on to the most useless items simply because of the memories they’ve attached to them. It’s usually only at the end of the show that they realize holding on to all that clutter kept them from having a clean and fresh environment ready for new memories to be made.

Philippians 3:13 is usually the go to Scripture to talk about letting go (“…Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead…). I always assumed that when we were being called to let go it was always bad things that we were letting go of. But reading the whole chapter, I learnt that Paul wasn’t letting go of only the terrible things of his past.
“Circumcised on the eighth day, of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews; in regard to the law, a Pharisee, as for zeal, persecuting the church; as for legalistic righteousness, faultless.” Philippians 3:5-6
Paul was born into a nation of significance, very religious and highly educated. If he held on to these things, I doubt he would have fully embraced the gospel of Jesus, and most probably wouldn’t be the phenomenal apostle (to the Gentiles) that we now know him to have been.

The down side of holding onto the good for too long is that I’ll eventually miss opportunities to do better than what I did before just because I’m so stuck on one old thing. You know how boring it is to listen to somebody retell the same old story of achieving something more than thirty years ago. It’s not boring because the achievement is insignificant, but because it seems the only reason they keep retelling it is because they aren’t making any effort to achieve new things. I can’t be nine years out of high school yet keep on telling people about my matric distinctions, what have I achieved since? I should set goals, achieve them and make new ones if I’m to live my life to the fullest.

When I hold on too tight to old memories, I become too occupied to make new ones. You can’t receive anything with your hands full. Each season we enter into has something new, something beautiful, something meaningful to teach and give us, but we will go through each and come out empty if we don’t make an effort to receive. It’s great that good things have happened for and to us, and I believe there’s more where that came from, but we need to make room to experience it. So in the words of Princess Elsa: “Let it go, let it gooooo!”