Hold on Loosely

I had seen it many times before, but this time my jaw dropped open and I had one of those moments...

The woman was kneeling down with a small piece of candy held in her open hand. She was talking at eye level to a toddler strapped into a stroller and she had a determined but pleasant look on her face. "It is time to give me back my keys," was the gist of the conversation being had (if one can have an actual conversation with a toddler). The toddler had an equally determined look on his face, but there was interest beginning to spark in his little eyes.

He looked at the shiny and intriguing set of keys held tightly in his chubby fist and then he let his gaze shift to the candy held in the open hand of his caregiver. It soon became apparent that the woman held a much better item in her hand as far as his tiny person was concerned. You can't eat the sweetness of a set of keys, and as he was years from driving, the attraction was waning fast. He tried only once to grab the candy with his other hand, which was met with a quickly retracted palm and a comment that he could only have the candy when he relinquished the keys. She offered the candy again with an open hand. It didn't take long after that for his dimpled hands to offer the set of jingle-jangle keys to the woman and to happily receive the candy as promised.

With that, the woman said something so simple and yet it was what had dropped my jaw. "Good trade! I am so very proud of you!"

Isn't that just exactly how God works with us? Determined yet incredibly patient and pleasantly waiting on us to make the right decisions and the right choices and even to receive better blessings from His very own hand. God is like that. He wants to give us the best gifts, the gifts most suited to our situation and our temperament, despite the stubbornness with which we cling to the things in our grasp.

God expects us to hold our things in this life with a very loose rein. He wants us to be good stewards, that is certain. But God also wants us ready to exchange what we have for something better he has in store for us. Nothing good comes of us holding onto our lives or our things with a white-knuckled death grip. When we focus on the thing in our tightly gripped grasp we put a stranglehold on it. It cannot grow there in our fist. It cannot become more when it is squeezed down between our fingers. We suffocate our dreams and God's plans when we hold too tightly. We lose our focus on the bigger plan of following God and walking with Him.

Open your palm right now. Imagine that you have something wonderful in your hand and close your palm into a fist. Now imagine if God were standing before you to give you the gift of your heart, your most wonderful-beyond-ability-to-imagine gift, but you need your hand to take it. If your fist remains closed around what you are clinging to He cannot give you the gift of your heart. Open your palm and imagine relinquishing what you are holding to receive what God has for you. Now look at your hand again. How much more can you put into an open palm than into a tightly closed fist?

That is the picture I had of God that day as I watched the woman and the child. God asking for my open palm to put into and take away from as He chooses. Each a gift of unimaginable value, happiness and yes, even sorrow. In all things, God is amazing at knowing exactly what I need at just the most perfect time. He is God after all and He loves me more than I can fathom.

So often we open our hands and we wait for those things God is going to put into them, be them physical, material, emotional or spiritual blessings. So often He empties our hands and gives us something we weren't ever expecting. But there are those times when it appears to us that our hands are empty. We feel alone, dejected, unloved and forgotten. Look again at your open hand. It isn't empty. Those empty hand moments are the moments God chooses to slip His own hand into ours, holding onto us and giving us Himself as a gift to hold.

Hold hands with the Lord today and thank Him for the very blessing of life pulsing through you