Gratitude and Trust: Six Affirmations That Will Change Your Life

Acceptance, Guides, Letting Go, Mindfulness

HAND IT OVER

 

The concept comes in many different forms, with many different sayings attached.

“Letting go and letting God”  is perhaps the most famous refrain.

A less specifically religious, but one that covers a multitude of higher powers…“I don’t know what to do – you take over.”

The second affirmation in Gratitude and Trust covers this.

We are only letting out the first two affirmations before publication.

“I don’t know how to do this but something inside me does.”

They all fall under the heading of, I don’t know what to do. I’m powerless. Confused.  At the end of my rope, my savings, my patience, my insurance, my knowledge, my sanity, my understanding, my empathy….

But the thing I cannot afford to be out of is my belief. In something. Anything.

So here: Take this over please cause it is weighing me down.

We have all been there at various times, in varying degrees.

Some believe in a foundational iconic God. Others believe in belief. Some thing, someone, out there is there to help me. So we hand it over.

But do we? Do we always?  Do we completely?  Do we patiently wait?  Or do we more often than not give it lip service?

“Here – whoever you are, I’m handing it over and not thinking about this.  It’s in your hands.”

We say it. We mean it. We do. We think we do. But it’s like most things we want, we eventually just can’t stay away from the results.

We might hand it over and have a few minutes, a few hours, or if we are lucky a few days of not thinking about it. We might bless ourselves with some time believing that someone out there is covering our butts. But then we start thinking about it. We start time keeping. “Hey, it’s been like two days and the job, the loan, the biopsy, the third date, the lost pet, the pain, the fear haven’t been eliminated, worked out, lost or found. Anyone up there paying attention?”

The watched prayer seldom comes to fruition as quickly as we would like. In fact watching and fiddling and going back in to try and fix it never really works.

But we are creatures of habit and letting go, really letting go is hard to do.  It’s kind of like breaking up.  It is like breaking up.  It’s breaking up with our problems.  And we are often very attached to our problems. And we are certainly attached to solving, meddling with and maneuvering their outcome. Which nine times out of ten we have already imagined in our heads.

Handing it over is just that. The solution is not up to us. And as anyone who has done this successfully can tell you, the solution is often far from what we envisioned.  Our higher powers tend to be much more creative than we are.

It is hard to let go and let that unknown force take over. Problems, prayers and requested solutions are like scabs, we put a band-aid over them, but in time we pick up an edge to see how they are doing, Then we can’t stand it so we rip it off entirely and before you know it we are picking at it, and instead of a solution we end up with an infection.

I have found the best way to Hand It Over, is to literally do that. I mean I now hand it over. I tuck it away in a box and try and just forget about it.  I have found it is the only way I can truly let it go.

I had a box made and on the front it says HAND IT OVER.* It has a zipper around it. When something needs that kind of attention, when I really need to let go and let my higher power take over. I write it down. For me writing it down takes it out of my brain where it tends to fester and gets it out there.

I then fold up that paper and I put it in the box, zip it up and hide the box.

It’s all put away, from my mind, my sight, my grasp. And then when I find myself thinking about it, cause hey, I’m human and a control freak to boot, I say, “No, no, no it’s in the box, it’s covered.”

But, in the cases where I really need to ponder it, I go to the box, unzip it, take out the slip of paper with that particular problem and read it. I give myself some private time with my problem. Then I hand it back over. I really try and only think about it if I make the effort to take it out of the box.

And sometimes while I’m hanging with the box, I look at some of my old problems, that were resolved, not always the way I wanted, sometimes better, sometimes differently than my request, but a resolution is occasionally the best we get. That’s life.

Looking at those now solved problems and resolved issues allows me to hand over the new ones and renews my faith in gratitude and trust.

 

 

 

*The concept of the God Box is not a new one. Some people have a hard time with the idea of God in general. In that case a hand over box does the trick.