Let Go and Let God

The problems that often confuse us are really conflicts of double-mindedness.

“Let go and let God” is a familiar phrase and has been around forever I suppose. For this reason, and like every memorizable and repeatable truism, it’s easy to run past it without any serious thought. But let’s not do this right now. There has to have been a reason it was coined and shows up on the walls of twelve-step meeting rooms around the world.

This Still Point Project’s stated purpose is to direct you and me away from the socially popular conventional knee-jerk solutions to life’s challenges. It points us, instead, in the opposite direction. It tells us that our best solutions will be found when we sit and ask for help from the only source deeper and wiser than our own perceived intellects.

The still point disconnects us from looking for advice from “experts” and instead empowers us to live courageously against the popular current pressing us to just go along to get along. It offers a life of deeper meaning and greater power to swim against the social currents of our day.

Discomfort in this context is expected and preferred. No quick solutions promised. Instead, understand that letting go feels like an out of control step and one a quitter might consider.

The opposite, holding on and struggling to achieve a victory over things, seems in most minds a more responsible thing to do.

Which shows us the problems that often confuse us are really a conflict of double-mindedness — wanting to let go and hold on at the same time. Wanting our cake and eating it too.

Which leads to a great opportunity to review one of Robert Frost’s most famous poems, The Road Not Taken. If it isn’t familiar to you, then your exposure to great literature has been stunted. Sorry about that. Fortunately, it is easy to correct.

Here is the poem

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim
Because it was grassy and wanted wear,
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I,
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

---

I don’t know what problem or problems you may be facing right now but I do know which road will lead you to the best solutions. Let go and let God do what he does best.