Holding On

The Little Acorn that Wouldn’t Let Go

We have sixteen oak trees along the creek behind our house, and by my rough estimate, a good year drops something in the neighborhood of four million leaves into our backyard.  Acorns run to their own absurd number, and every autumn tens of thousands of them do exactly what acorns are supposed to do: they let go, drop, and go on to whatever comes next, buried, eaten, or planted. Last winter, one of them did not.

I noticed it in December, still holding fast to its branch, small and stubborn against a sky that had already stripped the tree bare around it.  I expected the next hard wind to finish the job.  It did not.  That acorn held on through the ice storm.  It held on through the gray stretch of January when everything else outside looked finished.  Wind that took whole limbs down left that one small acorn exactly where it was, still attached, through an entire winter it had no obvious reason to survive. That is not what acorns do.  Acorns normally let go in the fall.  This one simply refused.

We spend a lot of energy these days learning to let go, and rightly so.  Letting go of fear.  Letting go of the habit that is not serving us well.  Letting go of impatience, of the timeline we thought our life was supposed to follow, of the things we were never asked to hold in the first place.  Letting go is good work, and I am not here to talk anyone out of it.

But letting go is not the whole instruction.  Some things are not meant to be released, no matter how hard the wind blows or how long the winter runs.  Our grip on God is one of them.  Not a polite, seasonal grip that loosens when the weather turns hard.  A fierce one.  The kind that outlasts the ice storm and the gray stretch of January and whatever else the year throws at the branch.

“My soul clings to you; your right hand upholds me” (Psalm 63:8).  Cling is the word.  Not admire from a distance.  Not visit on the good days.  Cling, the way that one small acorn held its ground through a winter that gave it every reason to fall.

So, this year, when fall arrives and I am out there with my rake and my four million leaves, I will be watching for any stubborn holdouts. This time, however, I’ll be searching my heart for the ones that I may be unnecessarily keeping. We probably all have a few tucked away.  The fear, the anxiety, the burdens we were never meant to carry - release our grip and let them fall.  They don’t belong to us.  Then hold on to God the way that little acorn held its branch, not for a season or until the weather clears.  Hold on to God forever.