Letting Go: Not So Easy

At lunch on Friday, a friend and I talked about my latest blog, Captivated by a Classic.

She told me she had enjoyed the story of Lassie and her trials. Her attention, however, was particularly captured by the place in the story where the old people, who had nurtured the wounded dog, fallen in love with her and hoped to keep her, had come to the painful understanding that now that Lassie was on four feet again, they needed to let her go.

“I know you were writing about the hero’s journey, but this was the part that got to me,” my friend said, “because it is where we are in our family right now.”

Her oldest daughter will graduate from college this month and has lined up a job and an apartment with friends in a distant city. Their other two daughters have nearly finished college and have internships away from home this summer.

“Over and over again,” my friend went on, “I have to remind myself that our daughters are up and running, have places to go and personal purposes and dreams, some of which are still unknown. I have to let them go,” she said, solemnly. “And my job now is to find ways to fill the emptiness in my life that I sometimes feel.”

She shook her head, smiling wistfully as she reached for the huge chocolate chip cookie that we were sharing. “So promise me,” she said, laughing and biting into the cookie, “that if I start taking on the form of the Pillsbury dough boy, you will have an intervention!”

Did anyone else have a similar take on that part of the story?

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Thoughts and Prayers

We pray that the 200 young girls recently abducted in Nigeria will be found soon. We hold their families in our hearts.

We pray for peace in Ukraine.

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Blog Notes

For those of you who are subscribers to this blog on email and have not been receiving it, I apologize for the glitch. My blog guru took a shot a fixing it last week to the end that on Saturday I believe subscribers suffered from a blog tsunami, receiving three blogs at once. I am hoping that today’s post will fly through cyberspace and successfully land on your email doorstep all by itself.