Lord, Help Me to Let Go.

From the age of sixteen, I knew exactly what my life was going to be about.

Music.

I played the double bass and decided I was going to be a professional, and I built everything around it. I practiced six hours a day. After that came rehearsals, and most evenings there was a performance somewhere.

I went to college to study it at one of the London conservatories. It was hard work, but I loved it, the kind of love that doesn't feel like a sacrifice because you wouldn't choose anything else.

And somewhere in my early twenties, my back began to hurt at the end of the day.

At first it was the kind of thing you assume will pass. But it didn't pass. Playing made it worse, and playing was the one thing I couldn't stop doing, because it wasn't a hobby, it was the whole plan.

I saw specialist after specialist. Physical therapists, chiropractors, anyone who was recommended. Nothing fixed it.

Slowly, and then all at once, I had to accept that the future I'd spent a decade reaching for wasn't going to happen. I'd begun to associate music, the thing I loved, with pain.

I had to put it down. And it wasn't only an instrument I was setting aside, it was an identity. For years, who I was and what I did had been the same sentence. When the doing stopped, I no longer knew who I was.

More than a decade later, I still grieve it. There are days a piece of music comes on and the loss feels as fresh as it ever did.

For a long time I wanted to know why. I don't think God broke my back to teach me a lesson. We live in a world where bodies wear out, and good plans come apart, and not every hard thing is a message from heaven.

What I couldn't see at the time was that I'd built my whole sense of self on something I was able to do. And anything you're able to do can one day be taken. A career. A role. Your health. The plans you've been reaching toward since you were young.

When your identity is fixed to any of it, losing it doesn't feel like losing a thing, it feels like losing yourself.

Even all this time later, I can't tell you I've let go perfectly. I'm still doing it. It's like I let go of a balloon years ago and then all of a sudden it's back in my hand and I have to let go all over again.

And maybe that is the part no one warns you about. Letting go is rarely one clean moment. It is something you do again, every time the loss drifts back into your hands.

What lets me keep opening them, even on the days I don't want to, is knowing I am not letting go into nothing. There is one thing about me the injury could never reach, one thing no loss ever can.

Long before I was a musician, before I was anything I could do or fail to do, I was His. The psalmist knew what it was to watch everything he leaned on give way, and still he could write, "My flesh and my heart fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever."

That is a foundation that does not crack. Not what you do, not what you are good at, not the future you have been building since you were young.

Simply this: you belong to God, and nothing that happens to you can take that away.

So if there is something in your hands right now that you can feel slipping, or something you already know it is time to release, you do not have to force your fingers open alone, and you do not have to do it only once.

You look up, the way a child watches a balloon rise, and you ask. Lord, help me to let go.