Micromanagers

My sister and I email each other very often. Some days we will email several times. It is a wonderful thing. Wish it were available during our child rearing days. We could have been such better friends to each other with the easy communication. We have lived so far apart for most of our lives. We talk more on email than anytime. We probably know each other better now than at any time in our lives.

All that to ask a rhetorical question she asked in an email.

We are always telling people to turn it over to God, sounds so easy but how do we really do that?

Some things we can control, the themostat, the dish washer, the vacuum cleaner, the lights.....but then there are more things that are out of our control and all we can do is stand back and watch things happen, you may even see it coming like a rainstorm in July but you could not stop it any sooner than you can stop the wind. Being the independent people we think we are we are always wanting to micromanage our lives and those of our children, their children and any who will come thereafter (too bad we will die and will not be around to help the generations thereafter! What will they do?!).

Turn it over to God?!
Okay, now how did you do that again?
How do you let go and let God?

The problem as I perceive it is the letting go of it. We do the praying thing, the pleading thing, but when it comes to the letting God deal with it for us thing...well, that is just not easy sometimes. Funny, it seems that there are some people who appear that they can just do that and then there are those who just worry all the time.....they talk about it to themselves, they talk about to their friends, they talk to acquaintances, they talk about it to the person squeezing the produce next to them in the grocery store. They just can not seem to put it behind them. I think partially it is a personality thing and probably the average person falls someplace in the middle and worry sometimes and lets go sometimes.

It reminds me of shopping trips with other mothers with all of the children. Just stand back and watch the mothers. Some mothers have their kids lined up single file, all holding hands and are not allowed to make a step beyond her without being seen by the overseeing mother. Then there are the kids riding up the outside edge of the escalator to the second floor and somewhere before they get to the second level someone taps the mother on the shoulder and asks, "are those your children?" I always believed myself to be somewhere between the two but I probably am closer to the manager-mother than the loosey-goosey mother.

But when it comes to letting go of our worries how do you manage?

Me, I pray specifically about what my concerns are, plead for His intervention, request that God help me to set aside my worry and ask that God will help ME to want God's will more than my will to be done. At the most worrisome times I turn to Psalm and Proverbs because those books are comforting to me and as modeled by my sister I started my little notebook of verses that I call my comfort words.

Starting a new painting helps me to put the ugly thoughts right out of my head and focus on good things in my life.

I am better now than I was yesterday but not as good as I will be tomorrow.

I can not let go until I know God.