Hope Anyway by Leeana TankersleySample

Day Three

“OK.”

Much of life is discerning what we are to hold and what we are to set free. I still find it counterintuitive to let something go, to stop fighting, to surrender. We think we can will something into reality, into change. We try to write computer programs for our lives. If this happens, then this. Rarely, if ever, is this the case.

I’m more and more convinced that faith is what happens when we go to God with our own set of circumstances, sit with God and ourselves, and experience the red-hot vulnerability of listening.  

Somehow it feels safer to put our trust, our hope, in our own bargaining than to believe there are any gifts in the listening, the letting go. Lot’s wife turns back to the burning city, even after she is told not to. She wants one last look at what had been, and she never recovers. 

This is familiar to me, in the same way that the Israelites’ bargaining, once they realize they are entirely reliant on God’s provision in the desert, is familiar to me. All of a sudden slavery wasn’t entirely intolerable. 

The etymology of the word begin is “to cut open” or “to open up.” We cannot move into the new country with one foot in the old country. We have to open up to the new path, again and again, as clumsy and painstaking as it is. 

If the new country is where you are being invited and what you are being offered, might you believe that something sacred is and will continue to accompany you as you travel?

After the counseling appointment where I received the news of my divorce, I sat in my car and I knew that the only way out was through. I knew that the voice telling me to let him go was a familiar voice, a voice I could trust, the penlight in the cave. I decided to listen and to follow that tiny illumination. 

So, right then and there I took my hands off the steering wheel and I turned them over, palms up and open, the back of my hands against the hot metal of the Honda logo. I said, “OK.” 

Which can be the most sacred prayer we pray. 

God, what are you be asking me to say “OK” to?