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Letting Go

It’s January again, and although I long ago resolved to cease the wearying and ultimately discouraging practice of mak-ing New Year’s resolutions, some habits are particularly hard to break, especially for a go-to-it, to-do-list-making person like me. This time around, I resolved to unpack that dreaded word—resolution —and get to the bottom of it before I launched 2007 with any more of those across-the-board vows (“I’ll make my bed every day”; “I’ll never yell at my kids”) that are doomed to future failure.

The verb to resolve, as it turns out, has its origins in the Latin word resolvere: to unfasten, loosen, release. Well, loosening is just about the polar opposite of how I usually feel when I resolve to do some-thing—abdominal muscles taut, teeth clenched, mind determined to change my behavior by sheer willpower. What would it mean—in my family life, my friendships, my work—if, instead of clamp-ing down and pushing my way into the new year, I loosened my grip on the life God gave me and offered it back to him instead?

A dizzying thought. And, of course, a thoroughly biblical thought.

This past November I experienced firsthand a lesson in letting go. My col-league and I shared the daunting respon-sibility of organizing a conference to enlighten the Body of Christ about the rise in female incarceration and to challenge it to address the problem. Almost everything about the endeavor was difficult. We assembled a group of 20 speakers, many of them formerly incar-cerated, and we had heard none of them speak before. We arranged a visit to a local women’s prison, and the bureaucratic logistics were sizeable. The venue for our conference was still—in spite of promises to the contrary—undergoing renovation,

and we didn’t have enough registrants to even begin to cover our costs. The possibility of failure was enormous—which is probably why, in the end, the conference was such a success, since the possibility of failure is inextricably linked to the possibility of grace.

My letting-go lesson came from one of our speakers, a delightful nun by the name of Sister Elaine Roulet. Although well past what most people would con-sider retirement age, she is still devoting her life to loving, empowering, and advocating for women behind bars. She told us a story about a Tibetan singing bowl she once saw advertised while working as a women’s prison chaplain. She ordered this bowl in the hopes that its ringing song, used for centuries to assist in mediation, would be a non-threatening invitation to silence and prayer, regardless of the prisoners’ faith backgrounds. When the bowl arrived in the mail, she took it out excitedly and followed the enclosed instructions, hold-ing the bowl in her hand and striking it with the accompanying wooden stick.

To her disappointment, it emitted only a dull thud. She tried again and again, each time evoking nothing more than a lackluster clunk. Eventually she realized that she had been clutching the metal bowl so tightly in her eager fingers that the bowl was unable to vibrate. When she loosened her grip, the metal rang freely and sweetly, instantly becoming the stirring spiritual invitation she had hoped for.

Sister Elaine shared this metaphor with a room full of dedicated, godly women and men who, like her, have devoted their lives to prisoners. Many of them were weary, frontline workers who care much and are paid little or nothing for the efforts they expend in an arena where the need is greatest and Christians are scarcest. Many arrived at the conference with somewhat guarded gazes and shoulders sagging from the fight. But here was this beautiful, white-

haired nun, reminding them that not only is it okay to lighten up and let go, but it is also essential.

What does all this have to do with the current issue of PRISM? Everything really. For it is only by letting go that anything of value is ever accomplished in this world. In our cover story, Chi Huang let go of his comfort while he was a young medical student and went to La Paz, Bolivia, to work with street children. Then he let go of his personal need to see every street kid housed in an orphanage and instead learned the impor-tance of ministering to the one child in front of him at the moment. He learned to listen to the kids rather than preach to them, to trust God to work in their lives rather than try to do it all himself.

In “The Dangers of Evangelical Nostalgia,” Todd Lake urges us to let go of our fantasies about an allegedly Golden Age of the past, when life was better, sin less prevalent, and Christians nobler. Failure to release this figment of wistful imagination prevents us from living out our faith boldly and radically today. In “One Builds Coalitions for Justice, Another Builds Family Life Centers,” Dennis Hollinger invites Christians to loosen their grip on their oft-held con-viction that there is only one right approach to God’s work.

In “The Bishop and the Mango Tree” we meet a man whose willingness to give up preconceived ideas about Christianity and culture opened the door to full-on revival in the church in Bali. In “Hand-made Hope, Homegrown Faith” we see a group of Mexican women giving up the label of poverty and donning the mantle of daughters of the Living God.

“Lighten up,” my husband some-times (wisely) suggests to me. Or, as Jesus puts it (in The Message), “If you grasp and cling to life on your terms, you’ll lose it, but if you let that life go, you’ll get life on God’s terms” (Luke 17:33). I think I can resolve to live with that this year. How about you? ■

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