“To let go is not to be in the middle arranging all the outcomes, But to allow others to affect their own outcomes”

How often do we put ourselves right in the middle of our grown kid’s situations without being invited? When we don’t see things going the way we think they should or decisions being made the way we would make them, we look for ways to manipulate or control things. We hurt for them when they must pay painful consequences and so we jump in and try to make it easier for them. What we are doing in many cases is paying the consequences for them.

For younger kids it may be something like doing their schoolwork in hopes that they will graduate from high school. For adult children we may be paying their bills or even bailing them out of jail. It breaks our hearts for them to be homeless, so we allow them to stay in our homes even though they are continuously breaking our rules and may be verbally and even physically abusive.

We are not helping our children to be the men and women that we want them to be, and more importantly who God designed them to be. And in fact, we are contributing to their negative and destructive behavior by enabling them to live the way they want to live without having to pay any consequences. We are inhibiting their growth as human beings because the way that we all grow and learn is by experiencing the consequences of our decisions and behavior.

When we finally “let go”, stop trying to arrange all the outcomes and allow our kids to affect their own outcomes, we experience relief from our anxiety and we can begin to live our own lives again.