Stories

The Center for Leadership Excellence, in partnership with COSROW, is pleased to lift up the voices of women in ministry encouraging fellow women in ministry. Please enjoy this month’s Encouragement from Jessie Larkins, ordained elder in the NC Conference and founder of Emergent Therapeutic Services. Anyone can sign up to receive these monthly emails here. 

As my kids push fully into their teenage years, I’m getting (*painful*) daily lessons in learning how to let go. Growing into independence, they no longer want my daily inquiries into their lives, my hugs, my wisdom advice, or even my presence on many days. Knowing that their days living in our home are numbered, I find myself desperate to hold on to every moment with them. Watching them fumble through their first independent choices, it is hard to not control or criticize. Loosing my grip on their lives is a daily spiritual practice. And if my kids were the assessors, I assure you that my grades would look a lot like their report cards–all over the map! We’re all learning how to do this work of growing up.

My struggle in parenting teenagers is just a microcosm of a more significant spiritual struggle that most of us engage throughout our lives: the desire to have control over everything. In our attempts to stave off fear of uncertainty about the future, the destabilization of constant change, or to avoid the free-fall feeling that comes when we feel out of control, we exert a vice-like grip over anything that looks manageable: liturgies, policies, others’ behavior, our diet and exercise routines, our schedules, and even at times our spiritual disciplines. The more we fear, the more we grasp. The more tightly we hold on to rules, to certainty, to expectations, to others, the less likely we are to have open palms for the gifts of connection, laughter, joy, delight, and the messy growth of new life. I have so much sympathy for post-Resurrection Mary when she is admonished by Jesus not to cling. In her disorientation and fear of the future, she is just like me: holding on tightly to the thing in front of her that feels controllable. If she doesn’t let go, he can’t leave again, right? If she doesn’t let go, her heart won’t break again, will it?

Jesus said to her, “Do not cling to me, because I have not yet ascended to the Father. But go to my brothers and sisters and say to them, ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’”
~ John 20:17

Reflect and Take Action:

Mary’s clinging in this story comes from standing at the same myopic vantage point at which I’m often tempted to stand in moments of change and destabilization: one that makes judgments about the entirety of a situation based on a few known facts (and a whole lot of feelings). Jesus recognizes his coming departure as a necessary part of God’s unfolding plan to redeem all creation. Jesus understands that new birth comes through labor pain and tears; that life comes through death; that he will not return in glory unless he departs in peace. If Mary can let go, then Jesus can do what only Jesus can do.

Learning how to live with open palms, to gently touch rather than strangle new growth, is a spiritual practice that I am learning by praying with open palms, a prayer posture I adopted when learning and teaching the Daily Examen. I’ve had to physically train my body to engage the posture that I desire for my spirit: one that is open, even in the face of fear and uncertainty, to receive each day in all of its mess and beauty. In doing so, I have opened a channel of Resurrection life into my own: authentic connections with individuals whose bodies defy the “rules” I was taught as a child; the pure delight of enjoying an (entire) slice of cheesecake offered by a widowed neighbor despite the fact that is is 70 bajillion calories more than I’m “supposed” to eat in a day; setting aside the carefully scripted sermon in order to attend the child that wandered into the pulpit; letting the chores go because the teenagers took us up on the suggestion for a post-dinner family walk today. The ability to live with open palms, I’m realizing, is not the ability to live without fear. It’s the ability to live bravely in the face of fear and uncertainty (and yes, sometimes in the face of heartbreak and rejection) because we have trust in the One who has already written the end of this story and is daily pouring that promise of new life into this world if we only stopped clinging and opened our hands to receive it.

In partnership,
Center for Leadership Excellence and the Commission on the Status and Role of Women