If you’ve ever held a newborn baby, you’ve felt the finger grip. The precious “death grasp” of five tiny fingers wrapping around your unsuspecting digit. It’s so strong you seriously question how a little human can muster so much strength. It shocks me every time.
Often the grip moves quickly beyond just your finger to grab hold of anything within reach. My hair is very familiar with this practice…
The clutch is instinctive – it happens almost concurrent with a first breath. We reach for something that we can hold to, control, find security in. We reach for something that we can trust.
I think that this practice takes on different forms through stages and ages. But it’s always there – it’s always us grasping for something secure to find peace and rest within.
My fingers have clenched tightly to beliefs, financial security, achievement in academics/work, approval from parents and friends, health, being loved and wanted back- the things I value most.
I cannot imagine how tightly a parent must want to grip a child – so much love, care, and hope for all someone can be…coupled with a strong feeling of control/influence over the outcome.
But life.
So little in life flourishes within our death grips- and the grip gives us a false sense of control. The feeling of security that we get by holding something out of fear of loss never seems to help us keep it. We often have so little power over the things we grasp.
When beliefs or health trend in downward directions, our tendency can be to “hold on” for dear life. To read all the books, take all the medications, try all the diets. To make sense of senselessness – to remove the brokenness in our world.
When we want someone to love us, to want us, to chose us, we try hard to become everything they desire and often cripple under the impossible weight of perfection.
My grip is more often than not motivated by fear or anxiety. Fear of not knowing how to be healed, fear of not knowing where God is at any given moment, fear of not having the right answers or right belief, fear of being rejected by someone I love.
I want to hold to things, ideas, and people that I cannot control – that I have no claim to. This has failed me.
And it will fail me again.
Friend, you cannot make someone want you.
You cannot meet everybody’s expectations.
Likely you will not always believe the right things about the world, or God.
So Lord, give me open hands.
Let me not clinge to people or ideas I cannot control. Help me to let go of the dreams and desires that depend on truths I have no claim to – and expectations that are impossible to meet.
May I hold loosely to life – but still learn to love deeply.
Through uncertainty and heartache, as things slip through my fingers, please hold my hand. And lead me, oh Lord, to love the security that lasts.
nolkins 