letting go

The evening found her sorting through email. In the spirit of spring cleaning, she'd decided to do some digital housekeeping - her inbox was reaching critical mass, and it was beyond time to clean it up. Sifting through digital junk, she thought to herself, moving down the message list. What fun. At least it's going quickly. 

Then she saw an email that stopped her in her tracks. That email address. She hadn't seen it in what seemed like an eternity. She stopped to think, and remember. 

Our experiences in life shape and change us. And unless we're hermits(!), we encounter people who play a huge role in these experiences. They come and go; some stay for a long time, while others impact us only briefly. Whether they are our friends, or the proverbial thorns in our side, we often don't appreciate them enough, have a difficult time allowing them to change, and an even harder time letting them go - sometimes regardless of whether they have shown us kindness, or caused us pain. And mostly for those who stay in our lives for a long (or long-ish) time, when they go, however that going may happen, we mourn them.

She'd come across an email from someone who had been a part of her life for several years. Someone who meant very much to her, who had been a great friend, but who ended up causing her great pain. She'd forced herself to let this friend go, when it became clear that was the choice she had to make to preserve her own well-being. It had taken her a very long time to really let go of them after making that decision. Thinking of her friend brought her pain, and sometimes anger, as she was reminded of what used to be, and how it had slipped away. Who her friend once was. The friend who had accepted her for who she was, not the friend who had begun trying to change her into someone she wasn't. The loyal friend, not the one who had quit talking to her when they'd realized they couldn't change who she was.

The friend she remembered, and deeply loved, and whose "going away" she had mourned. She considered again the loss she'd felt at having to let them go, while knowing things could not, and would not, ever be the same again. That still stung. Maybe that pain will always be there to remind me, she thought. I don't know.

What she did know was that she had learned that sometimes it's much harder to forgive those we know and love than it is to forgive those we don't. And that, just as we can't change people into someone they're not, we also can't try to keep them in our lives when God is showing us that it is his will for us to let them go. "Every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end," and when God removes someone from our lives, it is never without the intention of doing something new - even when it hurts.