Family Challenges

Hold on and let go

My older daughter recently announced plans to study in Ecuador next year. I think it's a great idea -- for someone else's daughter! Of course we're thrilled, but we're also terrified to let her go, just as we were anxious when she first went off to the park on her own, rode her bike to her friend's house across busy streets, stayed overnight at a classmate's, or the day we dropped her off at college. Here's a paragraph out of Wendy Wright's masterful book, Sacred Dwelling; a Spirituality of Family Life (Forest of Peace publishing, 1994) that strengthens my faith as a father.

"The twin disciplines of family are welcoming and letting go. . . .Letting go involves radical faith. It means entrusting what you most love to the expansive care and protection of God. By this I do not mean that if you pray hard enough God will keep all the awful things that could happen from happening to your child. Nor that every evil, even evil perpetrated on the innocent, is, somehow, 'all in God's plan.' But that somehow God's presence is available to us even in the mysteries of human suffering and death. . . .This kind of radical trust in an accompanying God is what allows us to let go."

 

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