My blog today is pretty transparent for me personally.
Over the last few years, there has been a shift in me.
Looking back, I realize I used to be pretty possessive. Not really about money or things. It was usually about people and places where I had invested a lot of myself.
If someone drifted away from a friend group I was part of, I took it personally. If someone left the church I attended and started going somewhere else, I took that personally too.
I probably would not have called it possessiveness at the time. I would have called it loyalty.
But there is a fine line between loving something and believing, somewhere deep inside, that because we have invested in it, it somehow belongs to us.
People do not.
That has taken me a while to learn.
Some people are going to be part of our lives for decades. Others may only walk beside us for a season. Sometimes people we have poured into will eventually move in a direction that no longer includes us.
That does not make the investment wasted.
Jesus spent His life pouring into people, yet He never seemed desperate to keep them. People came. People left. Some followed closely. Some walked away. He loved them without trying to control their response.
There is something freeing about that.
I can love someone and still give them room to leave. I can invest in someone without expecting a return. I can be grateful for the years someone walked beside me without being offended when God moves them somewhere else.
Ecclesiastes says there is “a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing.”
I think I understand that better now.
Maybe maturity is learning to love deeply without holding tightly.
I still want to invest heavily in people. I still believe in loyalty. I still feel the loss when someone I care about moves on.
I am just learning not to close my fist around what God never asked me to own.
Some of the greatest gifts in our lives were never meant to be held forever.
They were simply meant to be held with open hands.
First Light
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