October 2011
Starbucks in Holy Corner, Edinburgh, Scotland
Seat 61, train ride from Edinburgh to London
I’m a toucher. Not a groper, mind you. I just mean that if I’m sitting beside you or standing around you, I’m probably going to grab your arm, pat your back, or shove you. (The shove usually only happens if I start laughing a lot — and it sometimes looks like a punch. I tend to overexpress. Consider yourself warned.)
Especially when I am leaving. When I am leaving, I want to hold on.
On July 4, 2011, I was exactly one week from moving from Nashville to Edinburgh. The weeks before had been rough, and I mean rough. I was terribly sad to leave my community. I knew what God had said about Edinburgh. I wasn’t wrong about taking that step. I just was brokenhearted to leave my people. I cried with no warning. Literally. Not even for myself. Every “last” was torturous — including, but not limited to, my last chicken burrito from Baja Burrito. (I’m writing this while in Edinburgh, and my mouth literally just started watering even speaking of Baja. We all have to make sacrifices; mine just looks like chips and roasted tomato salsa.)
So on that sunny day in July, our crew in Nashville had spent the day tubing down the Buffalo River. We laughed as people got flipped out of their tubes by rapids, and we brought enough snacks to float all the way to Florida and never get hungry or thirsty. It began to rain, and we laughed again, as everything we had worked so hard to keep dry in the river below got soaked by the raindrops from above. It was one of those bookmark days, the kind you will tell your kids about.
Exhausted, a little sunburned, and happy, we finished the stretch of river and headed to a fine dinner at Sonic.
Listen, I never claimed we were classy. And you can’t judge me for wanting Tater Tots after working all day to keep myself safely in a tube floating down a river. (For those who have never tubed, that sentence was a joke. There is minimal work involved in staying in a tube. But I love any reason I give myself to eat Tater Tots.)
We got back to Nashville just in time to clean up and reconvene for the massive fireworks show that the Fourth of July always guarantees. Apparently a little alone time was all I needed to get my sad emotions going. We met up at Nichole’s and walked toward the parking deck, just a friendship amoeba — a blob of people. To my left, Curt — a production manager for a local band and one of the most responsible and kind men in my life. Curt is one of the people on the planet who makes me feel completely safe. To my right, Lyndsay — a fantastic writer and one of my best friends.
As the tears began to puddle right on top of my lower eyelids, I slid my left hand into the bend of Curt’s right elbow. We smiled. The tears rolled slowly down my cheeks. If there was a way to stop them, I didn’t know it and couldn’t have thought through those steps clearly anyway. I said to Lynds, “Hold my hand.” And so we walked, the three of us, linked by my sorrow, to see a fireworks show.
I just wanted to feel them. I knew that was what I was giving up by moving away.
Because of modern technology, I don’t have to be in the same town to hear and see my friends and family. Thank you, Skype. But I can’t feel them. I can’t touch them.
I had to sacrifice the presence of my people. I had to let go.
And I feel it happening again here in Edinburgh. I stood by Louise at church on Sunday, and as our friends were baptized in the hot-tub-looking contraption, it was all I could do not to grab her arm. I can’t be in the same room with Theo, the one I call my Scottish little brother, without hugging him. I just want to know their presence while I’m here.
Because before I know it, I’ll have to let go.
If you could see me now, you would laugh. Maybe. Probably not my mom — she would be sad for me — but the rest of you would be entertained. I’m on a train that departed from Edinburgh Waverley Station, and I’m heading down to London for a week. About ten of my Nashville friends are there, and I’m prepared to do a lot of hugging and hand-holding.
But for now, I’m sitting by the window in seat 61, sharing a table with two businessfolks headed down for meetings. And here I am in my jeans and striped cardigan with The Wedding Band in my ears and tears begging to be released.
I. Am. A. Crier. And just talking about letting go gets my inner waterworks system on alert. But I’m trying to hold it together, mainly for these poor hardworking chaps beside me. (And that’s the part that would make my mom sad — the picture of me trying not to cry on a train as it chugs down to London town.)
Letting go has always been hard for me. Yet I have seen, over and over again, that to simply let go is a powerful catalyst God will use to move me toward the next best thing.
I couldn’t grab hold of Nashville until I let go of Marietta.
I couldn’t grab hold of Edinburgh until I let go of Nashville.
It’s always nice, a wee bit easier, to let go when you know what you are grabbing hold of. The monkey bar option, I like to call it. You are willing to let go of the current monkey bar because you can see the next one you want to grab.
(I have to be honest here. I have no arm strength. So monkey bars are about zero percent fun for me. But I do know and understand how they work.)
The deeper call for courage comes when you let go with nothing ahead to grab.
It had snowed for days, which is weird for Nashville. Josh texted to make dinner plans, and I cringed. In my mind, I was standing at the end of a plank, and I knew the text was the barrel of the gun in my back. It was time to jump.
It was time to let go.
We had to end. We both knew it. Without a commitment and without a good understanding of what we wanted, we were merely wasting each other’s time being this invested. Fish or cut bait, they say. Bring on the scissors, I said.
He was my best friend. His friendship was a place of safety, honesty, and comfort. I loved him. I don’t totally know what I mean when I say that. But I know it is how I felt.
And on that December night, heading to a dinner that was meant for us to celebrate the release of my first book, my heart was breaking.
The weather kept everyone in town at home, but not us. We ate our burritos alone in the restaurant and chatted. The windows were fogged, and the room felt stale and almost too warm.
He asked the normal questions that spoke our language, and I answered in a foreign way — short, shallow, lifeless. If he noticed, he didn’t say. I tried to do more listening than talking. He was written into every story in my life, and I thought the more I could stay quiet, the more I could write him out.
We finished quicker than usual. We got in his car, and before the doors were closed, I was wiping away the tears from my eyes.
“I’m not dramatic. I’m just emotional. You know that’s different, right?” I asked. He nodded.
“What’s going on?” I saw in his eyes that he knew, just like I knew. We knew.
I thought of how amputations are always shorter surgeries than the ones where a limb gets repaired. And we began the amputation. A short ten-minute conversation about who we were, who we are, and who we don’t think we’ll be in the future.
I cried. He didn’t. He never does.
We pulled up to my house, and it started to drizzle a cold, almost frozen rain. I looked at him as he stared straight ahead.
“We’ll still speak in public, right? I mean, we aren’t going to ignore each other, are we? I don’t want it to be like that.” I spoke with a little shake in my voice, a part of me that only comes out in my mousiest moments.
“Yes. Of course.” He half smiled, one of those sad smiles that look more like resignation than mischief.
And when the door to my house closed behind me and I wept out the finale to my roommate, I knew what it felt like to let go.
That conversation didn’t happen because either Josh or I had a better offer in the hopper. We just let go because we were supposed to let go. Not because something better was in view. God just made it clear that the time had come.
Letting go like that is the hardest. And the days after, when you have to stand by what you know is right — that’s when courage has to bubble out of you. It’s then that my insides had to be like steel. And all the times that God has been right before, in the Bible and in my life, were on a movie reel through my mind, reminding me of his faithfulness. I watched it, that film on repeat in my head, because I had to know and believe he knows what he is doing (Philippians 1:6).
It may be a relationship or a job or a city or some money or old hurts. When it is time to let go, you know it. Your hands long to ungrip, but your heart begs them to hold on. But only in letting go are your hands free to grab on to the next thing.
Someday I’ll look back on that cold night’s conversation and know what it was all worth. I’ll know why having vacant hands made all the difference.
But for today, I still don’t know. Courage doesn’t tell you to let go when you know what to grab next. Brave people let go when it’s time to let go.
And so I turn these empty hands skyward, trusting they are better off this way.
Please let go. Please be brave enough to empty your hands without seeing the next monkey bar.
Sometimes you have to let go of things that are bad for you — addictions, abusive relationships, sinful habits. That takes courage too. It doesn’t matter if the thing is good for you or bad for you; if it isn’t the best for you, you have to let go.
Do you know what I know about you? I know that if you are meant to let go of something right now, your heart is beating out of your chest. You don’t have to ask yourself what it is — that thing is blazing on your insides.
You see the picture of the relationship that isn’t right.
You see the dollar sign telling you that giving away that money, letting go of it, is the bravest thing you could ever do.
You see the addiction in its ugly, slimy form.
You see what you’re supposed to jump away from even if you don’t see what it is you’re jumping into.
It brings to mind a favorite verse that, if you are right on the end of that plank, will make you absolutely insane. I’m sorry in advance: “Trust in the LORD with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways submit to him, and he will make your paths straight” (Proverbs 3:5 – 6).
I let go of Josh because I chose to trust God with all of my heart and not lean into what I understand. I flew away from Nashville to live in a foreign country because I knew that was what submitting to God meant. For all the moments when I have missed courage and chosen the easier path (and my friend, there have been many), I got these two right, and my life will never be the same.
I don’t know how, and I can’t put the right words to it, but I know the courageous sacrifices are always worth it.
So, friend, let go.