There are courageous, daring people who will go to great lengths to spread a message. Some of these messages come in the form of what some people would name graffiti, words painted on highway signs hung far above moving traffic. When I see these words suspended in mid-air, many in languages I do not speak,I try to imagine when these words were painted. How did the writer make their way to the precarious precipice with a spray paint can in hand? Was someone hanging onto them for dear life while they wrote their message for the world to see? How were they not seen, perhaps arrested? At what time of day or night did this happen without being spotted? Did they dangle upside down, held by their ankles by an accomplice, chosen to be the writer because they have the ability to form letters backwards or inverted?

Over the weekend I came upon one of these highway messages. This one did not take such acrobatics. Its message did not use paint but what appeared to be strips of cloth woven through a freeway overpass bridge made of chain link fence. Carefully threaded through the links of the hard metal, in neatly created third-grade cursive writing, were three simple words:”Let it go.”

Let it go. Seeing these words made me smile, made my shoulders relax away from my ears, allowed me to take a little deeper breath. Let it go. I imagined all the people who have traveled and are traveling past this message even as I write this. People who need to have someone say these very words to them. People who are clutching the steering wheel too tightly. People who are clenching their jaw, grinding their teeth unknowingly as they hold onto, what? Fear? Dread? Anger? Hurt? Failure?

I know these people because,several times a day, I am one of them. In an effort to create a life, I can try to control so many things, things over which control in only in illusion. And because that illusion becomes the focus of my attention, I can send messages to the muscles in my body to “Hold on”. Hold on. I am going to conquer this. Hold on. I can make this come out just like I want it to. Hold on. Hold on. Hold on.

“We must let go of the life we have planned, so as to accept the one that is waiting for us.” says Joseph Campbell. This is a difficult message for most of us. Yet so many of the world’s faith traditions carries this very wisdom. The season of Lent has this letting go at its center. We read the sacred texts that tell of Jesus’ eternal letting go into the living out of God’s call in his life. His works of compassion, mercy, healing and hope led to events over which he had no control. His life was a continual letting go into love. And so it is with each of us.

How does the message ‘let it go’ sound in your life today? How do these words come into your eyes and ears and find a home? What needs ‘letting go’? What is really at stake in doing so?

Someplace in the two cities I love there lives a messenger who has less fabric than they did a week ago. They used those pieces of cloth to send a message to all who need it, to all who will listen,to all who will answer its call.

I am grateful.