Knowing when, and what, to let go

This morning when I took the dog for a walk, we were playing a game of fetch with an old stick that she picked up on the gravel road. The game was fast and furious, but the stick was so dried up and brittle that it sometimes cracked and broke into two pieces when it struck the ground. I soon noticed that whenever Brandy went to fetch the stick, she always tried to bring both pieces back to me. Even if the broken piece was barely two inches long, she would faithfully arrange both pieces in her mouth, as if she had a responsibility to bring the whole stick back, instead of simply choosing the part that was most usable.

It was such a funny, quirky thing to do, and yet, even as I watched and smiled, it struck me that sometimes we can approach life in this way: just as the dog didn't want to leave part of her stick lying in the roadway, sometimes we are also reluctant to leave behind or "lose" things that have been part of our lives. And so we try to take all the pieces with us - sometimes even the "broken" pieces that are no longer useful or helpful to us. And sometimes carrying these things is just as awkward for us as it was for Brandy to pick up two pieces of stick in her mouth!

Last year, when I was preparing to leave Cape Town, I discovered that I'd had a tendency to be a "hoarder." I seemed to have accumulated so much stuff over the years and, when I was packing my suitcase, I constantly had to make decisions about what to bring back with me to Europe and what to leave behind in South Africa. I would look thoughtfully at a book I had once enjoyed, or at a pair of shoes that I seldom wore, and wonder whether I could squeeze them in... But the airline's baggage restrictions forced me to become ruthless: to recognise that there was no room to take everything with me, and that I needed to give lots of things away or simply leave them behind!

Brandy's commitment to bringing back the whole stick was admirable... but it would have been much easier for her simply to make a choice and to leave one of the pieces behind. As I go through life, I pray that I will increasingly learn to draw on God's wisdom to do the same: to know which things are important enough to hold on to and take with me... and which things are the pieces I need to let go of and leave behind me on the roadway.