Let It Shake It Off

Shake it off and let it go.

It's funny that the two biggest pop songs of the past year had titles that mean basically the same thing. And if I had a nickel for every time I heard either one of them . . .

It’s also amazing how often I’ve found myself using those same phrases in conversations with friends lately . . . only to laugh that they are, indeed, straight out of pop tunes that have lit up every teenager’s iPod the last twelve months.

Too many of my friends are carrying around too much that they need to be turning loose. Letting go. Shaking off. It’s a common problem among moms, but not just parents. Many folks with compassionate hearts tend to hold onto other people’s problems as their own. We find out that someone we love is going through a difficult time or facing an awful challenge, so we internalize that problem and begin to carry it inside until it becomes our burden too.

Loving them does not mean owning their problems.

We see this problem or challenge as something we need to solve. We worry about what will happen in the lives of our friends and family members, and we own their issues as if they were our own obstacles to overcome. We create internal lists of our many difficulties and add stress to our life as we see all of these problems as our own.

We know how to pray for each other, so that’s not the problem. Many of us are wonderful “prayer warriors” and spend many hours lifting up other people’s lives to our loving heavenly Father. Part of the problem is that when we get up from our knees (physically or virtually), we reach down and pick the problem back up. It’s as if we’re saying, “Thanks for listening, God. Now I think I can really handle this better. I’ll let you know how things turn out.”

But a bigger problem is that these are not our problems in the first place . . . they’re other people’s problems. That doesn’t diminish the reality of each situation, but we should not be considering them our own issues.

A great book came out years ago called Boundaries by Drs. Cloud and Townsend. (I highly recommend this book for everyone!) It is very important to establish personal boundaries and only own those problems that are your own.

One of the biggest reasons to stop owning other people’s problems as your own—even your children’s and your spouse’s and your parents’—is that God does not give us grace for other people’s problems . . . only as they directly relate to being our own responsibility. In other words, if God has called you to counsel, guide, support, or have some other role with another person, God will give you the grace and wisdom for that purpose. But God will not give you the grace to worry about the problem; fear and anxiety will only exhaust you.

Matthew 6:26 says, "Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they?" Can you imagine if a cardinal started worrying about what a blue jay was going to eat? What if a woodpecker started putting away seed for the nuthatch? Do you see how absurd that would get . . . quickly?

So shake it off.

Prayers gonna pray, pray, pray.