Relinquish

One of my favorite things about yoga is this: If you hold a pose long enough, particularly a stretching pose, at some point your muscles let go and sink deeper into the pose. You think you are stretching your muscles as deeply as possible, but suddenly there's a release and you're able to stretch even further and more comfortably.  Every time this happens to me, I marvel at how tightly my muscles had been clenched without me realizing it and how much more natural the pose feels after they do relax.

Unfortunately, this is not what I look like doing yoga.

For this reason, my favorite yoga style holds stretching poses long enough for the release to occur.  (I'm not so much a fan of holding strength poses for long, but that's a different blog entry.) Sometimes the instructor encourages us to use sinking breathing, to make our exhales last longer than the inhales. It's amazingly effective in helping those muscles let go.

THIS is what I look like doing yoga.

Lately, it seems God's been holding me in a few teeth-gritting "yoga poses."  I haven't understood why entirely.  I was already flexible (I thought), fairly strong (I thought), somewhat peaceful (I thought).  But after holding these poses for several months now, I'm finally beginning to feel my jaw relax a bit and my muscles loosen.  I'm beginning to give in to the pose.  To relinquish...  


This Lenten season is a time of relinquishment for me.  Releasing...

• Reputation – I want to be well-respected and appreciated.  I hate being misunderstood and misrepresented.  (Don't we all?)  But Christ was misunderstood, misrepresented, marginalized.  Should I be different?  I relinquish my reputation.
• Control  –  Though I've never considered myself a control freak (perhaps I'm fooling myself?), I usually make every effort to ensure results turn out the way I think they should.  But hard work and (what I think are) good intentions can only go so far.  I cannot control others and their actions and should not try to do so.  I take my hands off the reins.
• Consequences  –  Consequences themselves are a grace. (Got that from my spiritual director.) Just as negative consequences eventually brought the prodigal son to his knees and to his true home, consequences do the same for us.  If I were to dictate consequences –  my own or others' – they would not be grace.  I choose to let God choose the outcomes.
• The future  –  My dreams, ambitions, hopes, expectations, speculations.  I thought I had found a vehicle to realize many of these, but that was not the case.  I am free from those false hopes.  Possibly, I am also becoming more free from needing to prove myself to myself and to others.  I do not stop walking forward, but I surrender the lead.
• Ministry  –  My usefulness to God, my purpose, my outlet.  So often when I've left one type of ministry, another one awaited. Now I scan the horizon and see only dim, indiscernible shapes. God will make them clearer in time, but until then He'll let me squirm a bit in my "uselessness" as I learn to relax into his unconditional love.

In his book Prayer: Finding the Heart's True Home, Richard Foster writes:

The Prayer of Relinquishment is a bona fide letting go, but it is a release with hope.  We have no fatalist resignation.  We are buoyed up by a confident trust in the character of God.  Even when all we see are the tangled threads on the backside of life’s tapestry, we know that God is good and is out to do us good always.  That gives us hope to believe that we are the winners, regardless of what we are being called upon to relinquish.  God is inviting us deeper in and higher up.  There is training in righteousness, transforming power, new joys, deeper intimacy. (p. 52)

*****************************

A creative and artistic friend of mine, who writes a really lovely blog recently hosted a group of moms and daughters for a self-portrait-collage-making session using gel medium transfer.  (I feel a tiny bit impressed with myself for that previous sentence!)  For her own portrait, she used a photograph of herself with her arms out, palms up, and from the photo, she collaged butterflies releasing, flying upward and outward.  

I've thought often about her artwork since then.  Is it possible that as I relinquish my tight grip and release these things, they then become things of beauty and freedom? 

I release with hope.