Control

When you grow up like I did, you try to know-it-all. Everything depends on it. Supposedly.

It has been a long time since "growing up", but still some strange place in your head never quite forgives you for not holding together what was never in your power to hold together anyhow— the loss of a parent, hoped-for joys of holidays and ordinary days quashed by volatility, or some other such thing.

Trying to be right, to know it all, brings the need for control; after all, it's so much easier to be right when you understand the playing field, have set the boundary lines yourself, inasmuch as that is possible.

Then along comes Life with a suggestion: let go, drift. In creation there is an inherent sense that we are not in control. In creation there's a sense of encounter, immediacy, Presence that we cannot control.

For a time, I too felt such an invitation. Let go. Drift with green grasses, morning dew, the stars. Then it came to an end, partly because my commitments call me back to a sense of control and management, but perhaps too because God knew it was time to set me in a new place of encounter, where I could not easily be in control. 

At some point I must have wanted to relinquish the burden of being right, knowing-it-all (it is tiring, often perplexing). And this desire sent me on unlikely journeys— first into Creation, now into daily writing. The words sometimes come, and at other times do not. I worry, fret, labor, and finally give myself over to God’s grace, trusting that the words will come - and I am not in control.