The Beauty of Letting Go

I’ll never forget my first encounter with a Tennessee Autumn. As a Texas native coming from an experience of seasons that included a green Spring, a mostly 100 degree Summer, and an October that consisted of leaves turning brown then dying - My eyes had never set sight on the wonder of a crisp, colorful Norman Rockwell-esque Fall. 

As soon as I pulled into Nashville’s Warner Park, I gasped as I entered a world I had only seen in movies and magazines. I was surrounded by otherworldly beauty. It didn’t take long before I began to discern double meanings in the landscape before me.

The beauty of letting go was the theme of the hour and this theme was close to my heart. I had just moved from Texas to Nashville to accept a music industry invitation. Through the process of leaving home, I learned the reality of death and resurrection. This is to say, within the seasons of our lives, something old must often die for something new to be born. Life had offered me a fork in the road, one that would require my primary focus on my beloved immigrant community to become peripheral so that my line of sight would be newly available to follow God’s calling in Tennessee.

The green leaves would turn to gold, the branches would become bare but eventually God and time would signal beauty to emerge.

I don’t believe the human heart was made for goodbyes. If we’re honest with ourselves the process of surrender often feels unnatural, yet the natural world embodies the beauty available to us in letting go. Autumn leaves yield to the process of transformation, a reminder that change is often a trust fall.

In the center of Warner Park, creation was converging with my story and a holy stirring was taking place within. As I looked out on the poetry of God these words came to me,

I never intended for a trip to Warner Park to become a revelatory encounter with God but when we create space for silence and solitude with Him we open the doorway for the mundane to become holy. 

When we are open to paying attention to the activity of God around us, creation can become a living prompt to ask the right questions and to allow the Holy Spirit to stir and reveal God’s truth in deeply personal ways.