You know what? I’m letting it go. I am letting. It. Go.
The need for it to be perfect. The need for it to be perfectly planned, perfectly executed, the frantic grasping after every detail to fall perfectly into place.
I’m letting it go.
I have to, you see: I’m driving everybody nuts. Including myself.
The fact is, I saw this movie Friday night, by myself - I actually can’t remember the last time I did that. This time I was babysitting for our teammates’ anniversary, and I had a whole quiet evening all to myself, with a new batch of movies to pick from. I clicked on one called “Leap Year”, and opened up a story. A story of a girl, not very different from me, who also loved control - even a bit more than I do, if that’s possible. Through a series of events she ends up in Ireland, and meets this guy who couldn’t be more different from her…. And they have a series of adventures together, unwillingly at first, and then more willingly because each realizes the other has something they need, something that’s changing them. For the better.
My favorite line in the movie? The scene I actually re-played on my computer the next day when I laid down to rest at naptime (can’t remember the last time I did that either)?
They agree to make dinner for the folks at their bed and breakfast, and they’re out in the garden picking vegetables. Anna is consulting a recipe book, and trying to find three medium carrots; she decides one of her three is definitely larger than medium. So the guy, Declan, takes the carrots from her, snaps a chunk off the end of the bigger one, and says, “There. Three medium carrots.”
And then he pushes the recipe book closed and says to Anna, in his soft Irish brogue:
“It’s dinnuh! Why dontcha stop tryin’ to control everythin’ in the known universe? Just have a little faeth, that it will all work out!”
Just have a little faith. It will all work out. I smile every time I remember him saying that. Anna’s response? The reason she doesn’t listen to advice like that is because her dad always said that, and all his money kept going after “the next big nothing” that came along. Cut to Anna working two part-time jobs after school, and their house getting repossessed on Christmas Eve - Ho, ho, ho. “So you’ll forgive me,” she says quietly, “if I don’t listen.”
For Anna, it was an unreliable father that made the floor fall out of her world and shoved her into a life of trying to control every tiny detail. What is it for me? What is that makes me yearn to control every detail of my life, to straighten every space, de-clutter every surface? What drives me? You could say it’s because of our lifestyle, that when you move as much as we do, it’s natural to try to keep my surroundings as much in order as possible. You could say when we live in countries where so many things are completely out of our control, it’s natural to want to control the little things I can reach.
You know what it really is?
It’s really that I just don’t “have a little faith.” Deep down, if I’m honest with myself, even though I do trust Jesus to do the big things - like, save me and get me to heaven - I’m not really trusting Him that He knows me well enough to take care of the little things too.
Things like having a plumber actually show up when he says he will, so we can dismantle our water tanks from this house and hook them up in our new house all in one day, so I don’t have to go without running water for hours on end (like everybody in the rest of our town does every day - I know, I’m so spoiled).
Things like what color curtains to have made, how to arrange our new living room, where to buy plastic storage containers for winter clothes, what meals to make while packing and shifting my kitchen.
Things like fixing the window in the bathroom so the dust doesn’t get in. Hot water in my next kitchen sink. How to hammer nails for pictures into concrete walls without making craters in the plaster.
Things like that.
Does Jesus really care about things like that?
The thing is, He does. He actually does. That movie taught me, in some way that I haven’t quite figured out yet, that Jesus actually cares about the little quirky bits of me - the bit that yearns to make pretty, ordered spaces around me, the bit that feels alone and abandoned and like a little lost child, the bit that hates being a floating speck of dust with nowhere to land, the bit that aches to own some earth somewhere in the world to plant a tree… He cares about those bits too. He really does.
If Jesus was Irish, I could just hear him saying to my heart:
“Just have a little faeth, lass. I’ll work it all out.”
*****
“Be happy in him, O my heart, and in nothing but God,
for whatever a man trusts in,
from that he expects happiness.”
{From the Valley of Vision prayer “A Colloquy on Rejoicing”}
