Often, it’s the fear of falling that makes holding on so difficult. It is our own desperate preoccupation with controlling the course ahead that renders us unable to navigate the course we’re on. It is the misguided belief that we can anticipate every road bump that usually causes us to trip the landmine.
Life is funny (or not so funny) that way.
“We cannot cross the cause why we were born,” William Shakespeare wrote. Our lives are always speaking to us, calling us, inviting us to grow into the very people we promised to be, no matter how long the journey or difficult the terrain. Often, in order to determine who we are, we must first determine who we are not. We must fall. We must get back up. We must reorient ourselves over and over again, taking small, but ineradicable steps in the direction of our truth, using our very own brokenness as a barometer of where we still need to grow.
Which means a life spent avoiding failure also happens to be a life spent avoiding life. Maybe not the life we designed or the life we think we want, but certainly the life that’s been waiting for us.
Sometimes we have to stop fighting the current in order to understand where it is trying to take us. Sometimes we have to be willing to let our dreams slip in order to determine whether they will endure. More often than not, our precious plans won’t survive the fall in tact. They may crack or break or even shatter into a million pieces at our feet. But isn’t this to be expected? Isn’t this the way it’s always been? Aren’t our greatest joys really nothing more than jagged bits of heartache, rearranged?
So today friends, let’s remember there is great strength in surrender. That there’s a difference between falling from grace and falling with grace. And that no brokenness should ever compel us to turn away in shame or hang our heads in despair.
Unless, of course, we want to miss whatever beauty may come of the pieces.