Raphah: Learning to Let Go

Raphah: Learning to Let Go

At the beginning of this year, I was blessed with the opportunity to join my dear friend on her brand new podcast. She asked me to speak on what God was teaching me, and I was happy to share the main focus I felt that He wanted me to have for this year. Since then, that focus has led to a lot of big changes and leaps of faith in my life, including starting this blog, so I wanted to share the background to my "word" for 2018, "Raphah", and some of what God has been teaching me since I started this journey with Him this year. You can listen to the podcast I did with Raising Rices here.

I’m one of those people that loves to set New Year’s goals, and for the last few years I have chosen a “word” to help define my focus for the year. I’ve done words like “able” and “enough”, and it has been something that has been both helpful and also just a lot of fun! At the end of 2017, I was going through my end-of-year routine, processing the last 12 months and trying to think through what God wanted me to focus on for 2018. 2017 had been a pretty rough year for our family, with a lot of loss and challenges, so I was feeling emotionally "shell-shocked" in a way, and truly weary. In times like these, I used to have a tendency to become very controlling with whatever I possibly could, and that was exactly what was happening in my heart as I contemplated the last year as well as the year to come: I was worn out and emotionally drained, and just clawing at whatever I could control. With all of that going on, I felt a very clear call from God asking me to just let go and let Him take care of things in the next year.

That challenge felt so scary to me, which was a clue that it was probably what He wanted me to focus on! I started doing some studying and research, trying to see if there was a special word that would “capture” that truth of letting go, and my work took me to a place I knew I could find answers and inspiration: the Bible. As I began learning about the truth of letting go and how it was used in God's Word, I was really blown away by what I found! The first thing that came up with my online search was the verse Psalm 46:10, “Be still and know that I am God.” This verse has always spoken to my frazzled, controlling, always-going spirit, but something I never knew is that the part that is translated as “be still” is actually the Hebrew word “râphâh”, and when I did some studying on that word, here’s what I found:

"râphâh, raw-faw'; to let drop, abandon, relax, refrain, forsake; to let go; to refrain, let alone; to be quiet" (Blue Letter Bible.com)

So, the literal translation of that verse I’ve read and loved for so long, is actually “râphâh (LET GO, drop, refrain) and know that I am God.” That was such a powerful word picture for me, envisioning myself just dropping everything, letting my hands hang down, being weak instead of trying to stay strong and keep it all together, and let God handle it! So, that’s the word I chose for this year: râphâh.

It's been 8 months so far of living out this adventure of "raphah", and I have been so humbled and blown away by all of the things God has taught me in it. I'm sure He still has a lot more to show me before this year is out (and, really, throughout my life as I believe this word is one I will want to live by forever!) but here are some of the things He's shown me so far.

God is teaching me to let go in my role as a mother. I think that motherhood is automatically one of those roles in life that has the highest risk of guilt, just because of the intense responsibility and importance it holds, but I also feel that living in this day and age makes “mommy guilt” way more intense and frequent. I really feel that one of the most damaging things to mothers is the idea that somehow everything is “our fault”, whether for good or not-so-good. If we have well-behaved children, we are told what a good job we are doing; if our kids are in a trickier stage, we are often judged (silently or not-so-silently) and end up feeling intense guilt.

I’ve noticed in my own life that it isn’t even just what friends or family say in a moment of my kids’ misbehavior, but also even some of the parenting magazines and books I’ve read have fed me this idea that I am somehow in control of how my kids turn out. There are countless lists of how what we do incites behavior problems in our kids. Your kid is throwing tantrums? It’s because YOU don’t give him enough attention. Your daughter is regressing in her potty-training? YOU probably forced her to start training too soon, and now it’s all ruined. On and on it goes, until the voices in our heads end up constantly questioning and berating every decision we try to make as parents, and every misbehavior or little quirk of our kids leads us to blame ourselves.

Now, of course as parents we DO have pretty powerful influence over our kids’ behavior, and there are things we can do to help or hinder them in their development. But to take everything on ourselves, and to believe that how our kids end up is all up to us and our abilities and actions, is a very disheartening and dangerous thing. I can’t control my kids. They are their own people, with their own decisions, weaknesses, and abilities (or lack thereof!) and God purposely designed them that way! He also purposely gave them to me to parent, in spite of my own weaknesses. Something so encouraging that my own mom has told me over and over again is that God “fills in the gaps”. Where I mess up or fail as a parent, God can and will come in and meet my child’s need. They are His first, and He loves them more than I ever can! I am learning to let go in my mothering—let go of my unfair expectations of myself, let go of the guilt that comes from feeling like I’m failing or messing them up, and let go of my precious children themselves, trusting God to love them and care for them better than I ever could.

God is teaching my to let go when it comes to my physical appearance. You don't have to look far to know that body image is a big issue in this day and age. I know we’ve all heard about how damaging it is for women to see super models and other unrealistic body standards, but something that I’ve found damaging that may not be considered as much are the more subtle messages we hear and read even from a medical standpoint! BMI calculators, “ideal” weight charts, “correct” diet and even exercise standards can really combine to make us feel like we just don’t measure up, and don’t do enough to take care of our bodies. We are told from every possible voice how to have the “ideal” form, whether people use that terminology or not, and it is very, very disheartening--not to mention confusing! I’ve heard so many different opinions on what we should and should not be eating that I’m not even sure what is good or not anymore!

Last year I did everything “right” according to the medical experts and society in general. I exercised like a fiend 5-6 days a week, to the point that I made myself nauseous! I counted calories, stopped eating sugar or carbs, and ate an abundance of veggies. I drank half my body weight in water. And guess what? I didn’t lose ONE POUND. Now, yes, I did lose a couple inches, but it was just such a small “payoff” for all of the intense work I was doing that it was totally not worth it! I was making myself completely miserable. Beyond being sad about the lack of results, I was angry. In my head, I was following the “formula” for having a healthy body.

Exercise + eating well – carbs and candy (and anything else I really want to eat) = my ideal body weight. Right?

What was I doing “wrong” that made my body not respond?

Well, guess what? Ultimately, I’m not in control of how my body processes things. God is. He is the one who knit me together and chose everything from my height to my metabolism. I can do all I can to take care of my body, and I am working hard at doing that (with much more balance now!), but there is no guarantee that I will actually end up with the weight or appearance I’m longing for. So, God is teaching me to let go of my expectation that what I do will lead to a fit figure, and to just focus on doing what I can to care for my body (without going overboard and obsessing!)

God is teaching me to let go in my work as a home school mama and homemaker. I am a very orderly, organized person, and I get genuine joy out of planning things and setting up order, whether that be a clean and tidy home or a well-structured day. Well, I’m learning that there are some seasons that order and tidiness and structure just cannot happen, and I was actually in one of those seasons at the start of this year. The holidays always kind of throw things for a loop, but right after the New Year, just as I was trying to get back into school, we all came down with the flu--all 5 of us! So that took out another week of trying to get back into our normal routine. And on top of not being able to do school or chores, we were adding extra mess because we were all 5 crowded into the same room for days on end, and things definitely got disordered. It was one of those times where we couldn’t just flip a switch and get back to normal. All of us were feeling weak, out of our normal habits, and just needing a lot of time to get back into things. I would have LOVED to be able to just snap back into a good routine and have a tidy home again, but God wanted me to learn that I needed to let go of those standards, have grace on my family and myself, and trust Him to lay out our days as He desired. I’m not in control of my days—He is! And trying to struggle against that truth to try to force my perfect vision to happen won’t change a thing.

God is teaching me to let go of needing to do/be "the best" and to accept His grace.

(This was a more recent lesson for me, so isn't included in the podcast episode I did with my friend.) A major theme I've gone over in my counseling this year is the idea that God doesn't expect me to always be the best, and there isn't always only one "right" decision to be made in each situation. Life isn't all black and white, right and wrong. There are some situations that are, of course, but I was living my life like every single decision I had to make had one "best" choice, and the others would be falling short of God's standards and expectations of me. Let me tell you, this is not a fun way to live! I can't tell you the freedom and joy that entered my life when I realized that in reality, God is perfectly happy with me no matter what I choose throughout the day. I can clean my house, or leave the dishes and go to the park with my kids. I can give extra money to charity, or I can use it to buy the new shoes I've been waiting and longing for. I'd lived for so long believing that God had only one or two truly "right" options, and He expected me to find them or risk disappointing Him; it's been so freeing to realize that He loves me the same, no matter what I do, and while I still have to face whatever consequences my choices have, nothing I do changes how He views me.

There are still so many more lessons that God is teaching me when it comes to letting go, and I'm excited to share them with you on this little blog! I think the main message I want all of my readers to get from this post, and my blog in general, is that there is real freedom and joy in just letting go. I was afraid to take the step of losing control and maybe even all of the good I'd found in my life, but the truth is that my life has never been more full and good and joyful than it is now that I've learned to let go. Consider this your invitation to join me in this amazing adventure of "raphah" with our loving God.