Read the following two sentences aloud several times paying attention to your experience of and reaction to what is says:
In holding on there is familiar comfort.
In letting go there is unknown peace.
What do you make of this? Does it ring true? Do you want to argue with it? Revise it?
Remember the condensed version of the Adventures of Sarah and Abraham?
God said to Abraham and Sarah,
"Leave the familiar and go the place I will show you."
Setting out and navigating by God's occasional guidance,
Sarah and Abraham journeyed by stages for the rest of there lives.
They might have stayed where they where. The were old and reasonably prosperous. Why leave? Because 'God' told them? Who is God to meddle in their settled, reasonably comfortable lives?
Reading the many chapters of their adventure we can tell that much (most?) of the time going to the place God shows you is very unsettling. Unsettling? How to do we feel about that word?
Yet at many, many places along their way Abraham and Sarah stacked up stones, built altars in recognition that they were where they were supposed to be. That they had followed their path. That they had found their way. That 'God' was in that place.
They could have stayed comfortably at home. In holding on there is familiar comfort. But they chose instead quite literally to be un-settled.
In letting go we find unknown peace: a yet-to-be-discovered level and experience of all that peace can be.
It's a real piece of work to trade familiar comfort for yet-to-be-discovered peace.
