Jeremiah 29:11

It occurs to me that holding my future now feels like holding sand in my hands. You can hold it, but some grains will inevitably slip through your fingers. You can’t really squeeze it tightly. The best way to hold it is with open palms. It feels like that is how I am being called to hold all the aspects of my future now. With open palms.

It also occurs to me that when you hold anything with open palms, your hands are in the physical position to be able to receive. If your hands are gripping onto something, then your palms aren’t open and your hands aren’t prepared to receive what’s coming to you. It’s a physical representation of an energetic principle. If you live life with the energy of an open-palm mentality, you’re not blocking your blessings with your death grip.

I think this is why so many of us have trouble receiving blessings. Because we don’t trust god enough and we death grip, believing that whatever we currently have is in our control to make stay. I know this has been true for me for most of my life. I thought it was up to me to make my blessings show up, and even more-so my responsibility to hang onto them tightly to make them stick. I didn’t trust god to be in charge of that. Some days, not gonna lie, I still don’t totally believe it.

Cancer ripped several things clear out of my death grip. So forcefully I couldn’t even have hung onto them if I’d tried. I had MY plan. Date to marry, find that perfect guy for me, make the love and have the babies, live happily ever after, etc. Cancer feels like a wild interruption to that plan. Dating is off the table for the foreseeable future, my fertility is in question, and my timeline to be able to have a baby and the way in which I would be able to do that is even in question. Not to mention that it feels like a long shot to find someone who is everything I deserve and want that would ever sign up for the extra trouble and risk it would be to love me and make a life with me. I lost that tug of war a month ago.

The rest is mobile like sand, unable to be gripped. Unable to be controlled by me. My work has been and will continue to be letting the parts of my life flow through my open palms. Accepting that I’ve never actually been in control of any of it. Making better use of my energy by flowing it into things I am meant to have control over instead of trying to exert my control over the future.

I had to make peace with MY plan being ripped from my death grip. I wasn’t given a choice in the matter.

I’ve been in continuing education for my coaching practice since March of this year. I enrolled in an advanced trauma training program being run by a mentor and former coach of mine. We learn about all the ways that trauma hijacks our nervous system, and more importantly, the ways we can use words and resources to reclaim what trauma takes away from us.

I didn’t realize just how much I would need my own learning and work to help me through what was coming around the bend when I started this training.

The truth is that I was struggling with the idea that god had a plan and purpose for my life that would satisfy me long before the cancer showed up. I was in the midst of trying to reconcile what I believed to be true about the god of my understanding and the string of bad experiences I’ve had following me around my whole life. I couldn’t make the two realities match up in my world. The belief that a god as powerful and benevolent as the one I want to believe exists would actually walk beside me and give me everything I’ve asked for in this world, when the evidence I have to look back on makes it look like I was hung out to dry.

When the cancer happened, I spent some time grappling with the new information, trying my hardest not to assimilate it into the bin with the rest of the evidence that god isn’t looking out for me. It felt easier initially to believe that because that’s what it reads like on the outside.

What god who loves me would give me to two parents who hated each other and used me as a pawn to get back at one another and lord money over the other’s head? What god who loves me would put a man on my path who would violate me when I was just a child? What god who loves me would give me cancer when I fought so hard to heal everything that’s ever happened to me? What god who loves me would give me cancer when what I actually wanted and asked for was love and a family?

Sitting in that dark hole of beliefs was eating me alive, and everyone around me could see it. During one of my training classes, we were working on a method of prayer that ties together someone’s belief that needs prayed over, the things holding them apart from the truth of the situation, a new belief to replace the one that needs to be released, and some form of powerful scripture or quotation that feels relevant to that belief.

I decided to work out my dismal beliefs about being abandoned by god and everyone around me in that class. I had to fight through my darkest beliefs about feeling alone in this world. I worked with my mentor to identify all the pieces of the puzzle for this technique. When we got to the last piece, I came up empty. I haven’t spent a lot of time with scripture and don’t have verses mentally prepared to use in everyday life. My training group began throwing out suggestions. Someone threw out Jeremiah 29:11, and when I read it out loud, something in me shifted.

“For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.”

It felt like the words I’d needed to hear from god this whole time. It completed my prayer in a way that made me feel like everything is going to be okay, somehow. That despite what I’ve always believed, it’s actually not all on me to make these things happen.

The next day, my sister called me and told me she had a sign that used to hang in the first house she bought before her marriage to her ex husband. She had this feeling that she couldn’t get rid of it, so it had sat in her closet since. She didn’t know why, but she felt pulled to keep it. When she was 29 and devastated from a heartbreak thinking she would never get married and have the babies she, too, so desperately wanted, her best friend in the middle of her own rehearsal dinner passed my sister a crumpled up piece of paper. On it was that same verse from Jeremiah. She had needed those words back then the same way I needed them now. She bought a sign with the verse on it and hung it in her house. Within 14 months she was married and pregnant with her oldest son.

I don’t believe in coincidences. I think that scripture found me when I needed it most. That same sign now hangs on my wall as a reminder that I’m not alone in this, even if my mind sometimes likes to make me believe that I am. I think my point in all this is that the information and blessings we so desperately need can only reach us when we open our palms and allow god to do the rest. When we have faith that god will do the rest. You can have faith or you can have a death grip, but in my experience, you can’t have both.

Big Love and Open Palms Y’all,

E.