Letting Go, Moving Forward (blog)

Before moving into her college dorm this year, my younger daughter tidied her bedroom here at home.  It was time to let go of some things.  Looking through her shelf of books, she found one about unlikely animal friendships (monkeys and kittens, elephants and dogs, and the like).  Paging through it one last time with her reminded me of an unlikely friendship of my own, with an elderly neighbor.Elliot lived in a little blue house and tended to the flowering perennials that populated his back yard and peeked through the fence into mine.  What mattered more than our differences - his worn work clothes and my new gardening gloves - was our shared passion for plants, and we enjoyed talking together about them.When Elliot gave me a Four O'clock plant, I stood eagerly by it at 3:30 waiting for the trumpet-shaped flowers to open.  When I gave him a beefsteak tomato from my vegetable garden, he took a picture of it and kept it on a shelf in his kitchen.  But it wasn't until Elliot built a wooden gate in the fence between us (and painted it blue, to match his house) that I realized how meaningful our friendship had grown.  Each spring he invited me and my daughters to come through the gate into his yard, to admire his new blooms with him.Once I asked Elliot about his gardening technique and, after rubbing the scruffy white hairs on his chin and pondering for a moment, he laughed and described it as "Creative Chaos".   He didn't concern himself much with landscape design, but rather believed that his work was simply to uncover and discover what was growing, and then tend to it.After Elliot passed away, his little blue house and flower garden were replaced with a new larger home and uniform grass lawn more suited to the busy lifestyle of today's homeowners.  It was time for change, I knew that, but it hurt to see everything that had meant so much to Elliot, and to me, uprooted and torn down.  Even the blue gate was taken away, replaced by a new black metal fence that felt like a cold barrier separating me from what had been.All that I had left, it seemed, was a sense of loss.I might have held on to that, and let the bitterness in my heart take root, had I not noticed that the flowers which had migrated from Elliot's yard into mine (blue Forget-Me-Nots!) were growing back through the fence and mingling with the grass in my new neighbor's lawn.  I remembered Elliot's gardening technique:  uncover, discover and tend to what's growing.  And I decided that the best way to let go would be to take hold of what I had learned from him and carry it with me, forward, into new meaningful relationships.My new neighbor doesn't spend much time out in her yard, so instead of meeting her over the fence I first 'uncovered and discovered' her at the grocery store.  We see each other there often now and we enjoy catching up and sharing the latest school news.  I'm hoping in time we will grow closer in friendship.Letting go has always been hard for me.  I feel sad that summer is over.  I'm feeling lonely with my daughters off to college.  I even struggle, at times, to let go of 'the way we have always done things' at church.  Embracing new people and places and ways of doing things is hard, but we do it in order to take hold of what we hope, no, what we trust, can become just as meaningful in time if we are open to it.At the very beginning, at Creation, everything was made - new!  God punctured the static void when He said, "Let there be...", and everything changed.  It was time!  Light and sky, ground and vegetation, stars and creatures, they were all new and God declared them all good.People were a new thing once.  Made in God's image, they walked closely in meaningful relationship with Him until that painful moment when they sinned and in doing so were uprooted from all that they had shared with Him.  Their only hope for restoration was in a new relationship with God, through His Son Jesus Christ, who died for their sin (and ours) on the Cross, and then rose again to life.  When we are baptized into our Savior Jesus, we begin our own new life of faith in Him.In faith we are always moving forward with our eternal friend, Jesus, growing in trust in Him and growing in meaningful relationship with the peope around us.