A New Kind of Letting Go

Callum and I have been married for more than a year now. After fifteen months in Hobart we've found our feet in new jobs, a new community, new places and routines. Our first little Woods baby is due at the end of June, and we're so excited to experience the joy and stretching of parenthood. 2023 holds a lot of newness.

It's funny, though, that as the seasons move on and I begin to pray about new chapters of life, there are certain things that keep coming back to me as the things that I still (again) need to write about, to process, to grieve, to claim resurrection in. I'm not sure if 'trauma' is the correct label for these things. They were certainly blows to my heart - disappointments, heartbreaks, raw terror, radical losses of control over circumstances - that haven't been easy to recover from. 

My dad's death was the biggest of these losses, and alongside it went many other 'deaths-to-self': in being unable to get through closed borders to be with him at the end; in his missing out on walking me down the aisle by just two months; in the steep uphill climb of those eight weeks attempting to move interstate, start a PhD, travel internationally through pandemic restrictions to be at dad's funeral, survive another week of hotel quarantine, cancel a wedding, plan a different wedding, and make it back in time to Australia in time for that wedding despite uncertain border conditions. In looking back, the last two months of 2021 were so nearly an impossible feat that I still feel waves of stress and grief remembering them. The years leading up to those two months - coloured as they were by Dad's cancer, the omnipresent pandemic, uncertain career prospects, and the mental gymnastics of wedding "planning" - weren't a walk in the park either. We had to let go of so much, and none of it was easy to surrender. 

Much of 2022 felt like a season of recovery given to me by the Lord. My word for last year was 'consolation', and He led me deep into places of healing, places of learning that He could indeed give 'beauty for ashes, the oil of joy instead of mourning, a garment of praise in place of discouragement and despair' Isaiah 61:3. 

I clung to those words of Isaiah on the days when I felt convinced (thanks, adrenal fatigue) that the rug was about to be pulled out from under my feet again. I was terrified of having even more to mourn, more challenges to battle through, more growing pains. I told Jesus again and again that I couldn't do any more. I had died to myself as much as I could, for the time being.

Yet life in Hobart was calm and quiet, touched with beautiful intimacy in our marriage, a period of stability after the immense flurry of changes, and plenty of space to listen to the Lord in all the hurting places of my heart. I sought out counselling, and filled screeds of journal pages with all the sorrow that I hadn't been able to feel at the time during that steepest season. I got sick a lot - covid in February and then cold after flu after cold all through the winter. We had a seemingly endless stream of house guests and busyness with visitors. But little by little, the storm clouds began to clear and some of the sweetness of the season started seeping through to me. 

Throughout August, that first-buds-of-spring month that always thaws my heart, I felt a decisive shift in the way God was ministering to me. His consolation in the first half of the year had been like a balm with gentle anaesthetic in it - soothing but somewhat numbing. Now, though, something fresh and sharp was happening: a prompt to look trauma in the face and say an emphatic 'no' to the lies I was believing about myself, about the world, and about God, as a result of it. 

This was consolation of a different kind.

It was like one day, after months of travelling across a flat, quiet plateau, I had reached an enormous roaring river. I knew I had to leave my baggage on the side of the river and have the courage to plunge in, to cross it, to allow the water to heal my wounds and misunderstandings. I had to strip right down to nakedness and actually submerge myself in this Great River of forgiveness and freedom. It kind of felt like another baptism, a choice to repent of the many little ways I had begun to hate and resent God for allowing my heart to break. 

And I wasn't sure I wanted to. I wanted to feel better, of course. I wanted to learn to trust reality again, to not be convinced that sorrow was the only inevitability. I wanted not to be numb any more, even if it meant re-feeling the stress and grief of 2020 and 2021. But I didn't know whether I was actually ready to let go of my disappointment. I felt a desperate desire to cling to my sense of loss and resentment, as if holding on to them could somehow be the key to resurrecting the old life, the life I'd loved so dearly and had to let go of. 

It's the strange thing about bitterness, isn't it? Deep down some part of us feels that we not only have a right to be bitter, but a responsibility to be. That our bitterness at trauma is the only way to maintain a sense of justice. That in refusing to forgive another, to forgive ourselves, to forgive God, we are doing the only thing possible to prevent us forgetting the thing or person we have loved and lost. We stay bitter out of a desperate necessity, a belief that in actually letting go we would lose ourselves forever. 

And that's when I realised that I hadn't actually 'let go' of anything. 

None of the wedding hopes and original plans. None of the desire for friends and family to have been able to be there. None of the determination to make it work against the odds of cancer and coronavirus. None of my mad, desperate optimism that my Daddy would live forever.

I hadn't let go of Brisbane, and the friends I loved there, and the places and routines I understood best. I hadn't let go of particular dreams I'd had for my mission field and career. I hadn't even let go of my old beloved identity as 'the girl who is discerning religious life'. 

There were crushes from high school I hadn't fully let go of. There were words spoken to me by friends and teachers that still, even a decade later, filled me with grief and indignation.

I hadn't let go of them because there was still some small part of me that defined myself by those losses. 

"I have a freezer full of anger I'm unwilling to let thaw," I wrote.

I wasn't an angry person (I told myself). I'd never allowed myself to be an angry person, because anger was violence and violence was evil. But all those hot feelings of rage and disappointment had gone somewhere - into the freezer, where they had become bitterness, cold and quiet and hard. 

And, yes, deep down, I felt that I had not only a right but a responsibility to preserve those stores of bitterness. If I allowed it all to thaw and melt, it would make a mess, for one thing, and I would be left empty. I would have no memories, no personality, nothing I'd ever loved or cared about, if I just let go. The freezer was how I preserved things - cold, hard, lifeless, sorrowful things, to be sure - but MY things. 

The trouble was, I didn't know there was any other way of preserving them. Was there a way of holding on to the Love that had been real, while letting go of all the trauma and bitterness of loss?

Could the holy fire of God's love actually melt my frozen anger, that hard cold bitterness, and still leave behind something, even once I had let go of everything? 

The only way to find out was by trying. God was calling me to cross that river, to leave on the shore all the baggage and wounds and bitterness I had held onto from previous seasons of grief and fear. He was calling me to submerge my whole being in repentance, and so be healed. 

"He shall baptise you with the Holy Spirit, and with fire." Matthew 3:11

It was a weeks-long process of prayer. The Lord gently, slowly laid before me everything I was still holding: the high school dramas, the attachment to old golden seasons of life and friendships, the stressors of the pandemic and Dad's cancer and vocational discernment and wedding planning and various jobs I had worked, my guilt for what I felt to be my failures as a daughter, as a friend, as a missionary, as a bride. 

He invited me to name the anger and the wounds honestly and precisely. He invited me to admit disappointment and sin and plain old saltiness. And finally He asked me to acknowledge that at the centre of each frozen block of bitterness was something that was, in fact, deeply precious to Him: Hope. 

In every traumatic memory or disappointment, there was Hope, frozen and hibernating and wanting to come alive again. There was a little hopeful Kate, naive and vulnerable and courageous in her optimism, whose Love and passion and vision for her future actually mattered to God. It mattered then, and it mattered still. He cared.

You must let old love come back to life. You will thaw only when you accept your regret and choose to reforge that which was broken by disappointment, to rekindle the crushed flame, and let Love glow rightly in you once more. 

I had been clinging to loss and resentment, desperately attempting to preserve old loves by freezing them in bitterness. Yet as those blocks of ice began to thaw and those vulnerable places of love and hope began to come back to life just a little bit, I began to wonder whether they had ever needed preserving in the first place. 

My love and my hope - the things I had always been so afraid of losing in the midst of trauma - were not in fact something that could ever be lost, because they were eternally held in the hands of One who would not let them go. I'd been caught in the lie that I had to keep carrying them, keep preserving them in bitterness because otherwise they would be lost forever. 

But now Jesus was teaching me another way:

These things will always be part of you. Because I hold them.

The memories of sitting on the front porch with your Dad watching a sun shower, and reading next to him on the sofa, and hiking, and minigolf, and Christmases, and bear hugs - these can never be taken from you. They still exist and will always exist, because I hold them.

The feeling of giving your heart to someone for the first time and passionately hoping they would return your love - that beautiful willingness to give yourself away, will never be taken from you. It still exists and will always exist, because I hold it. 

The tenderness of believing that you are deeply, inherently good and do not deserve criticism or harsh words from those around you - that can never be taken away from you, not by anything spoken or done by anyone. Your tender, childlike heart still exists and will always exist, because I hold it. 

The seasons of laughter and life-to-the-full you experienced with your NET teams and throughout your time in Brisbane - those feelings of belonging and rejoicing will never be taken from you. They still exist and will always exist, because I hold them.

The dream you had for your wedding, of 'a day where no-one was missing,' a holy day filled with all the people you've ever cherished and beautified by transcendent love - that still exists and will always exist, because I hold it. 

I was free to let go of trauma and loss, every sense of injustice, all anger and bitterness and fear - because they were not necessary to preserve the Love and the Hope at the core of my memories. God was holding onto my loves and hopes, looking after them and cherishing them for all eternity, and there was nothing I needed to carry forward with me in order to be fully alive as the woman He made me to be. 

The ice was thawing and flowing down into that Great River of healing I so desperately needed to cross. And I knew now that I could leave it all behind me on the riverbank - even the things and people in 'the old life' that I loved most and couldn't bear to let go of - because they would always exist in the hands of an eternal and loving Father. 

It's kind of funny - I remember having a conversation with a friend about this exact same Truth many years ago: "It's the difference between taking off a heavy backpack and just abandoning it on the side of the road, or taking it off knowing that your father is there to carry it so you don't have to any more." 

I guess the same truths come home to us in new ways in different seasons. 

I think in all of this what I'm really trying to get at is that when we haven't properly let go of something, it's because we haven't yet trusted that Anyone will be there to pick it up and carry it on our behalf. We surrender our hopes and loves not because they are not important, but because they are eternally important in a way we ourselves are incapable of holding. 

~~~

Friend, if you're struggling with a wedge of bitterness in your heart, I just want to offer this story of my 2022 to you as something that I hope will bless you. When God asks you to surrender, to forgive, to let go, it isn't because He is dismissing what you have cared about or loved or hoped for. It is because He wants you to have the freedom that comes from Him carrying it, not you. 

August was my season of crossing the Great River of forgiveness and healing - and I'm so glad I did, because on its far bank are new and beautiful lands that I know I wouldn't have been able to see and experience properly if my heart was still chock full of disappointments. September and October were the start of a brand new season, the kindling of a new love and a new hope in our lives. I really do believe that the freedom and holy emptiness in my hands and heart as I emerged from that River helped me say 'yes' to God and the new life growing within me. 

He asks us to let go - in a new and different way - in order to prepare us for all that is to come. Our past is safe in His hands: the love and hope that mattered then, matter to Him forever and will always exist, because He is holding them. We are free to surrender, to thaw, to cross the River and so enter the rest of our lives. 

AMDG