The call came in the middle of the detergent aisle in Wal-Mart. I heard him say the unthinkable and bent over my cart of pumpkins and Ziploc bags, balanced my elbows on the handle and rested my forehead in my hands. I wanted to cry but I was in Wal-Mart.

My hard drive crashed and all I can think about are the photos I took on our trip to England a few months ago. Over a thousand photos – including the castle of my ancestry – could be gone. I neglected to back up my files over the past few months, slipped my mind in the busy.

I push the cart down the aisle of bath towels looking for a shower liner for my son’s bathroom. Can’t read the price tags for the blurry mess in my eyes.

“Lord, is this a lesson in letting go for me,” I ask Him.

My sleeve wears the heartbreak and I inhale until it hurts, stand with shoulders a bit taller through the check out. And I can’t stop thinking about the possibility of what I could lose as I hoist bags of bread and cartons of milk back into the cart.

Tears sneak under my sunglasses on the walk to the car, a steady drip in the dam before it bursts open in heaves over the steering wheel.  

And I remember reading these words this morning, before I took a walk under mossy beards hanging from Live Oaks, when I fell in love with the light through my lens:

Enjoy my good gifts, but don’t cling to them. Turn your attention to the Giver of all good things, and rest in the knowledge that you are complete in Me. The only thing you absolutely need is the one thing you can never lose: My Presence with you. ~Sarah Young, Jesus Calling

Whatever is good and perfect comes down to us from God our Father, who created all the lights in the heavens. He never changes or casts a shifting shadow. ~James 1:17

I’m feeling a bit small seeing the reflection of myself blocking the light with what I cling to. He knew that I would feel this way today. That’s why I know I can let go.

I hope you’ll link any post you’ve written on the theme of Letting Go in the comments today. Here are a few posts on the topic I enjoyed this week:

Sarah lets go of what she thought her life would look like to embrace this season of glory. “Who would ever want to be imprisoned in the short, stubby dreams of their younger, less-knowing self?”

Michelle trades time for a square inch of silence. “When’s the last time you heard not Twitter chirps and cell phone beeps and garbage trucks, the swish of the dishwasher, rumble of the dryer, scream of the jet overhead…but the taptaptap of the downy woodpecker, the hush of wind in your ears, the gurgle of water over river rocks, the click of a beetle’s wings?”

Duane shares a haunting tale of his soul flying free in Haiti, “So I come to you today, friends, broken and so admirable of God’s grace and I wonder where I’ve been all my life, why I’ve locked myself out to the darkness of the world because I’ve also locked myself out of an authentic redemptive story and maybe I’m not the only one.”

This is #12 in the series 31 Days of Letting Go. You can read the collective here. If you are a writer, I invite you to link up any post you’ve written on the theme of letting go in the comments here on Friday. Subscribe to receive the series in your inbox or feed by adding your address in the side bar under Follow Redemptions Beauty.