What If You Don't Need a Net?

And you keep your hands open as you let go?

I don’t know what to hold onto.

Long ago, in grad school, a friend shared how taking risks and setting out on any adventure where you don’t see the outcome is like being out on a trapeze, swinging through the air, with no net beneath you. She described the feeling of the air against her face as she let go–and her body, tethered to nothing, stretching out to be caught by hands stronger than her own. 

I am stretching out. I am untethered. I have let go.

I didn’t want to write about this here, the discombobulation I felt when we returned from ten days away from home and opened the door to our house. The quiet rooms, the bedrooms with rumpled blankets and sheets, and pillows still holding the shape of young heads once pressed in sleep. I didn’t want to tell you about how, when we picked up Fulton, our dog, from boarding, he immediately went to Abby’s room, his sanctuary, and then Jackskon’s, and then Oliver’s. I didn’t want to tell you that I watched him from the hallway and then rushed to rub his soft ears. “They’re gone, buddy. We already miss them, don’t we?”

But that’s what is true. And that was yesterday. So be it. 

This morning, I move slower than usual through the house, hesitant to remove the sheets from the beds and pick up the random detritus left on floors, dressers, and desks: a whiteboard propped onto Ollie’s dresser that he used for his lists of summer goals and plans, a pair of dirt-encrusted Nikes in the hall outside Jackson’s door that he used for poison-oak infested mountain biking and frisbee golf with his friends, a glitter-filled posterboard commemorating Abby’s grit-and-laughter-filled practices with her rowing team. I move through the rooms and struggle against the lie: They took with them so much and left behind so little. What are you left with? What will you do here, left behind?

My mom called me the day before we headed to S.F.O. at 4. a.m.. “I was so very sad when you left home. When we dropped you off, and we left you there in front of your dorm, I sat in the car on the drive home and cried and cried.” Her voice was a love song and a warning: be careful with your heart; its breaking is swift, and its mending is slow.

Friends whose empty nesting began before ours offered advice: don’t come home to an empty house; take a victory lap; celebrate the hard work of launching kids out of the home. And Justin and I hear them. We absorb the stories, the cautionary tales: ‘I remember when we dropped off our last kid at college, and then we looked at each other and said, ‘Hey, now what?’’ And we linger a bit in Abby’s new college town, the two of us sharing long conversations over dinners in dimly lit restaurants, taking walks along the river, walking through a cement-paved labyrinth on the waterfront and hearing Jesus speak:

Will you allow Me to move through you? Will you trust that I am not stationary but active within you? Can you believe that my presence with you is not your holding onto Me but a letting go of everything that is not of Me? 

The uncertainty of this new season is as unfamiliar as ever. Never were we confident in our parenting skills; never did we feel we knew what we were doing. Desperate for God to parent us, we learned the hard way the value of humility and resilience and how much we needed to lay down stubbornness, selfishness, and pride. 

During that season of our kids at home, never did we need God more. 

During this season of our kids gone, never do we need God more. 

Do you know that allowing Me to move through you frees you to feel my movement in you in every situation? May I show you what I mean?

And I keep my hands open, my heart stretching with the trapeze’s gentle swing. I feel free, the air holding me as I fall.

With No Net

We hold a grip—tenuous and resolute
on memory, a slippery beauty we know
cannot be contained as
she dodges between flowers and races up
sides of buildings too high to climb,
tumbling like an acrobat from
cloud to cloud until the freefall
—tangling her hair and silencing
laughter that sounds a bit wild
though kind and free.

Jennifer J. Camp, from The Uncovering