Melody on a Mountaintop: Let It Go

I was done.

Done.

Stick-a-fork-in-me done.

I sat slumped in a chair in my attorney's office with the final blow to my stand for my marriage.

The stack of papers was thick with betrayal, and my head was spinning, as I perused the pages confirming what I had known in my heart for months but now of which I had plain confirmation in black and white.

The phone calls. The charges. The gifts. The trips. 

The deception.

There was no denying it.

And thank goodness my dad was in the seat beside me to hear what my lawyer was advising me because I couldn't focus on anything but those papers.

With every line, my hope died a little bit more.

My attorney looked sadly at me and said, "You need to take those home and process them.  And call me when you are officially ready to be divorced."

I nodded with tears welling apologetically in my eyes, wishing I could suck it up for five more minutes to preserve what little shred of dignity I might have had left.

I fell to pieces in the car as my dad transported me back home.  My spirit was consumed with pure hopelessness, and I just didn't know,

How to go on. 

And my dad firmly placed his hand on the stack of papers in my lap and declared, "Chelsea, this is God protecting you."

I'd heard the sentence before from my counselor, who tried to help me understand that sometimes great pain is God's mercy from what could be an even more painful future.

The door was locked and wouldn't open, no matter how hard I tried to jimmy the handle.

And it was the first moment I realized that maybe they were right.

Maybe this was God's way of finally releasing me.  I had given it everything I had for seven straight months, and I was done.  I had nothing left to offer.

He wasn't budging no matter what I did.  No matter how much I prayed.  No matter how much I changed.

I fell to my knees and opened my hands to the Lord.  And I remembered the phrase that I'd heard in the play (oddly titled) The Great Divorce, which my parents had taken me to see in March. 

One of the characters was in heaven and faced with a brilliant angel who asked him to give up a vice that he didn't want to let go. 

May I kill it? the angel asked dispassionately, while the man screamed in anguish at the thought of releasing something so important to him, even though it was destroying him. 

And when he finally offered the vice, shouts of agony echoed in the theater.

But once it was gone, then what was awful and ugly was turned into a beautiful stallion, on which he rode into the sunset.

And I felt the Lord asking me that question on the floor of my closet.

May I kill it?  May I take away your one-track view of how things should end?

I wasn't promised a perfect future or a knight on a horse.

But I knew that this marriage was not going to be saved.

And what could I do?  Hold on to it and succumb to a slow, silent death?

Or let it go and let the Lord take over?

I gathered all of the books I'd bought on saving my marriage and sobbed tears of defeat over them.  All of those hours and nights seemingly wasted.

Take it, Lord.  I give it up.  I can't do this anymore.

That's the funny thing.  The Lord can't fill our hands if they are already full.  They have to be empty in order to be filled.

My marriage was over.  This was it.  It was time to move on with the rest of my life.

Later that night, I took all of those books on divorce in the car with me, and I asked that my parents stop by the grocery.

I got out, books in hand, and walked to the garbage can.

I sighed a sigh of release and dropped them in the trash.

And never looked back.