Letting Go of the Junk in Your Truck!

Here is my true parable for you:

I had trouble letting go of a small blow-up water trampoline!  It wasn’t that I loved the trampoline or had lots of special memories associated with the trampoline; no it was because it represented a mistake I made!  The trampoline was purchased for the kids to use in our pond back in 2014.  The very first time we went to use this $50 investment I lost the plug.  It landed in high grass somewhere between my pond and the electrical outlet.  I searched and searched but never found it.  I lost it because I was being careless with the plug and not carefully securing it.

The kids were disappointed.  I was frustrated.  Even the eagle eyes of Amanda and Brooke could not find this lost item.  I rigged up the trampoline for a time with duct tape.  The kids were able to play with it like a raft, but it never worked properly.  I thought an air mattress plug would fit it, but it didn’t.  I thought I could contact the company and purchase one, but they didn’t sell the plugs.  So I put the trampoline in our storage shed.  It stayed there until this past Spring.  We cleaned out the shed and I discovered it again.  We filled up a trailer to take to the dump.  The trampoline made it on the trailer.  But when I got to the dump, I could not throw it away.  I put it in the back of my truck.  It stayed in the back of my truck for the last three months.  I hoped I could find a plug for it.  But I did nothing to ever look for a plug!  I just let the reminder of it punish me on a regular basis!  It got dirty and became pretty nasty taking up space in my truck.  For over three months I carried it around with me everywhere I went.

So this past week I determined to do it!  I determined to let it go!  I threw it away.  It is gone!  My fifty dollar loss and disappointing-the-kids mistake is history.  I let it go.  I couldn’t fix my wrong, I had to just let it go.

This trampoline parable reminded me of how we are with our mistakes.  We try to forget about them, but they keep being discovered.  We try to fix them, but we are not able to do it.  We even choose to live with them daily, just carrying them around everywhere with us.  We get used to the junk in our truck.  We develop lots of emotional baggage around it, things like guilt and regret.

At some point we have to decide–I am going to let it go.  I am going to move on.  I am going to throw the mistake away and move on to the future.  In our lives we can do this because of Jesus.

What are you carrying around in your truck?  Maybe it is bitterness from someone doing you wrong.  Maybe it is a rocky past filled with sins.  Maybe it is wasted time and years that keeps eating your heart away.  Maybe it is a big mistake that you keep seeing everyday and feeling the weight of it.  At some point you have to cut it loose.  You have to give up finding the “fix.”  You have to let it go and move on.

“let us also lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus,”  (Hebrews 12:1–2 ESV)