Letting Go - Starting Over

I was asked to give a sermon at a New Thought church in the East Bay tomorrow. I had spoken there before about "Abundance" and it was such a great service that they asked me to come back and talk so fittingly about "Letting go and starting over." Another couple of days and we are closing out the year to start over with a New Year.

While I know the bible pretty well, I am by no means religious and certainly not denominational. I do love "old wisdom" that remains living and active and is so fitting for those hard times. And preparing for this sermon has been quite something. "Letting Go and Starting Over" means something completely different to each person, depending on where each person is in their life. And finding biblical stories that sum up all kinds of letting go and all kinds of starting over was an exiting journey.

The sermon will be video taped and audio recorded and placed on YouTube. I'll keep you posted when it's done.

Meanwhile, we all have had a life where we had to let things go whether we wanted to or not. Sometimes things or people are painful to let go of, others come as a blessing. We love to let go of unnecessary weight and declining health, enjoying good health and a fit body. We don't like to let go of people when a marriage doesn't work out. Usually one if not both want to desperately hold on and make it work. I call this the "squeezing a square peg into a round hole" syndrome. It's only a matter of time until both people realize that working THAT hard to keep a marriage together was not the intended plan.

Yesterday I had an epiphany thinking about my own 15 year marriage and relationship to my ex-husband. We tried so hard to make it work. First I went to counseling by myself (because he felt that he didn't have a problem and therefore he shouldn't have to go). A year later we agreed to join a church and do it "God's way." With much counseling from other couples in the church we managed to hold our marriage together for a bit longer. Then we went to parenting counseling, which then finally turned into couple's counseling. That once again worked like a glue that made us hold on just a while longer.

But when our counselor decided to discontinue being a marriage therapist my husband's world fell apart and he refused to "start over" with someone brand new. For many more years to come we tried to apply what we had learned during counseling, but as time went by our "house" called marriage came crumbling down like a house of cards and there before us laid bare our foundation, cracked, ruined, uneven and in desperate need of demolishing. It was beyond repair.

No matter how much we loved each other, the silent and unhappy days seemed to overwhelm the good days. And we both withdrew into our own shells growing more and more distant. While we never yelled or threw things at each other and didn't call each other names, our fights were internal and within ourselves and they caused us to be drained, tired, unhappy and depressed - all while still loving each other and being respectful of each other. After all, we said "until death do us part." So if it is said that "love is all it takes" and "love conquers all" and "the greatest of these is love" why couldn't we make it work?

Because love is not all it takes when you were not meant to be together. Love IS indeed all it takes if you were meant to be together in the first place.

Letting go of the marriage and my family unit and starting over as a single mom didn't come easy, in fact it took me close to 15 years to finally admit that the red flags that I had overlooked at the beginning had now turned into 3-headed monster that grew stronger by the day. We all suffered, including our daughter - because our energetic differences were causing us to live with what felt like thousands of lightening bolts penetrating our souls each and every day. They hurt, we hurt - it was time to let go.

Today, almost 4 years later I wonder what I was doing thinking that I would ever succeed trying to create "water" out of two mis-matched chemical components. We just didn't match and the red flags were there from the beginning, but I didn't look at them that way at the beginning. The fighter I was I looked at them as challenges to overcome. And although we did overcome them, they were not here to be overcome, they were here to be warning signs, and I ignored them and paid dearly for them in many areas of my life. Just because there are rocks and bolders in a river bed the water doesn't demand for the rocks and bolders to move out of the way, it has no desire to overcome them. Instead it flows around and over them, gently hugging the rocks and bolders but without ever holding for a minute to make them do what they were not meant to be and do.

When we finally decided to call it quits, we promised to part as best friends, and we did. We did our own divorce papers, no attorney was involved, and we never fought over who gets what. It was peaceful and amazing.

Today he's engaged, our daughter grew tremendously seeing us stick up for our own happiness and not making HER the glue for us to stay together. And I am forever grateful to have taken the last 4 years to grow and get myself ready for my Twin Soul to enter my life.

I hope this story encourages you to be gentle and kind with yourself, to recognize red flags and to stop squeezing square pegs into round holes. There are more doors in the castle you've built for yourself. All you have to recognize is which one opens the easiest, because that is the one you are meant to go through. Yes, we have free will and yes we can force open any door, that's why we are called to have been created in His likeness; however, the consequenses of all our actions always remains with us. Selecting the right door is easier than you think. All you have to do is listen carefully in silence because opportunities whisper softly.

Here is to your letting go and starting over...