The Joy of Letting Go by Vicki Caruana

Author:Vicki Caruana
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Mom devotional;Books for empty nesters;Books on letting go;Letting go of your child;Letting go of teenagers;Letting children go;Devotions for parents;Separation with a child
Published: 2017-02-07T17:30:40+00:00

Thought Poke

Tread carefully when your sons and daughters enter into relationships. Your opinion has the power to make them run toward or away from their future. You don’t have to keep wise counsel to yourself; just give it and then trust your children to make the right choice for themselves.

Plans fail for lack of counsel,

but with many advisers they succeed. (Prov. 15:22)

Day 28

Positive Ease

But let your “Yes” be “Yes,” and your “No,” “No.” For whatever is more than these is from the evil one.

Matthew 5:37 ( NKJV )

I’m a knitter. For the first time, I learned how to make sweaters that actually fit and that people wanted to wear. This is no small feat. This, my friends, is a delicate dance between art and craft. I made sweaters for both of our sons for Christmas last year. They have different builds, and even though I measured carefully and knitted according to the prescribed pattern, when our younger son, Charles, tried his on, I could see how hard he was working not to disappoint me.

“It’s good. Yeah, it’s good. Well, it’s good enough.” He stumbled over these words like a drunk on a cobblestoned street. He kept shrugging his shoulders and pulling at the back of the neck. He wasn’t confused; he was uncomfortable. For the introvert it’s not always easy to express your wants and needs.

I snatched it back from him and with a smile asked, “How do you want it to fit? Like Under Armour, like a T-shirt, or like your hoodie?” If it didn’t fit comfortably, he wasn’t going to wear it. I made it so he would wear it. I needed to adjust the fit according to his specs, not the specs in the pattern I so carefully followed.

Getting Charles to tell me how he wanted his sweater to fit took several tries. It seemed that his desire to please and not disappoint me overshadowed his desire to have a sweater that actually fit. I came at it from a different direction. I noticed that he wore a favorite blue sweater several times a week. How that sweater fit him would tell me how he wanted this sweater to fit. It had enough room in it to wear over a shirt. The sleeves came down over his wrists. The bottom fell about two inches below his waist. Even with these new dimensions, I wasn’t sure how much I needed to change my sweater to fit to him. So I took the blue one from him with the excuse of washing it and laid it out on a table. Placing my sweater atop his, I realized right away that I needed to add inches from top to bottom and side to side. That meant ripping out a lot of the work I’d already done, but I really wanted it to fit.

Weeks later, Charles tried on the sweater again. This time a smile crept to his lips, and I watched his whole body relax.

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