It’s a Monday morning, and you decide to take a walk. The first thing you notice is the beautiful contrast between the blueness of the sky and the whiteness of the clouds. The air is quiet and gentle, as one might say a whisper. Then your eyes move to find the sun peering between the trees far ahead. Suddenly, you hear the leaves on the trees rumble as if to let you know the wind is coming. When the cool breeze comes running by, it brushes along your skin, creating goosebumps that last for only a second. This is your serenity, the calm rhythm that starts your morning.

“Let go and let God” is the phrase that popped up in my head during my morning walk. It is probably a phrase you’ve heard a lot, as I know I have heard it many times. You might be like “Emily…I know this already. What more needs to be said?”. I believe this to be a phrase that is overused, and while it is overused, it is not well examined. What do I mean by that? Well take the phrase “I love you”. The value of those 3 words should be priceless, but now our society has totally forgotten the meaning of love and has labeled everything as love, when it really should be “like”. But lets get back to the topic: “Let go and let God”. We all worry, and it starts as soon as we wake up in the morning. This will then carry along throughout our day until we go to bed. I think a lot of us believe that the worries we give God have to be big problems, such as wrecking a car, getting injured, losing your job, etc. But God doesn’t say for us to give him only our big problems. He wants ALL of our worries, anxieties, and stressors. I’ve been doing this myself every night with God, but maybe you can try it too. This idea is from Craig Groeschel where you take a box, label it “God”, and whenever you have a worry, you write it down on a piece of paper. Then you put that piece of paper you wrote on in the box, as a representation of you giving your worry to God. Whenever you choose to worry about that specific problem, you can freely take that note out of the box and say “God, I want to take my worry back and I choose to worry about it”. That is suppose to be funny because we should never choose to do that. It is not always easy to make the decision to let go. Sometimes when God says for us to let go, we hold on even tighter, becoming more afraid of the “what if’s” than the “what will be”. The whole point of us surrendering our life to Christ is choosing to let go and let God take control of our lives. By doing this, we don’t have to worry anymore, we don’t have to think about the “what if’s” because God already has it planned out for you. He did the work so we don’t have to. It should be a stress relief to not have to worry about things you have no control over! Let Go and Let God take control!

This is a message for YOU: God cares for you because he is your father. He says that you are always on his mind. He wishes you could see how close he keeps you to him, even when you shut your eyes and you cannot see. And when you are in a dark place and view everything with a negative eye, he cares about you and wonders how you are doing. He never wants to see you choose fear over him. He knows that many storms come after you and sometimes you let those storms cloud your judgement, almost as if God has disappeared from your sight. BUT while he knows all of this can happen, he truly believes that you belong here, you have a purpose, and you are the start to something amazing. And in that storm when you run away from God, he will remind you that there will ALWAYS be a chair open for you, that you are always welcome to go back home.

Give your worries to God. Let him take control. Storms will come and go, but God is everlasting. He will be there through it all. Just reach out and grab his hand.

Best,

Emily