Often, I feel like Queen Elsa in the 2013 Disney film, Frozen, with let it go repeating in my head like a scratched record or a warped mix tape warbling words of what has got to be the greatest three-word sentences in the history of ice queens.
Let it go.
Life can feel like an avalanche of situations outside of our control. Other than our reaction to things, we don’t get a say in much. Of course, that doesn’t mean we don’t have much to say, only that we don’t get to decide who listens, cares, or jams earbuds in their earholes when we speak. Despite my awareness of how much I need to let go of Every. Single. Day. I don’t want life to be merely a series of reactions to outside events. I want to be deliberate about what I let go of and what I strive to change.
Long before Elsa retreated to the ice castle, there was American theologian, Reinhold Niebuhr, who wrote the Serenity Prayer. I know he wasn’t royalty, didn’t have a 3-centimeter waist, and couldn’t turn people to ice with the flick of his wrist, but he did write a pretty good prayer. Read more
In a reporting class, I took in college, if a student’s article had any factual errors, the instructor automatically took 50 points off their grade. It didn’t matter how insignificant the mistake was it resulted in an inevitable failure on the assignment. Fact checking was more important than your lead, punctuation, or your inverted pyramid. The paramount significance of accuracy in news reporting was underscored.
Last year, seventh-grade parents were given the assignment to write their children a letter explaining the meaning of life. Seriously? Why not just write the cure for cancer? Or, solve the problem of world peace? Or do ninth-grade algebra? The meaning of life?! 
I spend a lot of time with the devil I know. A lot of us do. We are stuck in careers, relationships, routines, and ruts that we long to change, but don’t. There is a litany of reasons for this: fear, laziness, uncertainty, and lack of confidence. It boils down to the notion that the devil we know is better than the devil we don’t.
In grade school, at the beginning of the school year, students are often asked to write about their summer vacation. However, as the sun begins to set on the season, I am contemplating how to live like its summer all year long.
When I was a child, I considered freedom to be something grown-ups enjoyed. They can eat what they want, stay up as late as they want, watch what they want, buy what they want, and do what they want.
I have never been a horse person. In grade school, some of the other girls had pictures of the shiny brown mammoths on the cover of their Trapper Keepers, the eighties in-vogue binders with the velcro flap. The horses had perfectly straight hair and were frolicking in a pastoral scene of rolling green hills. I suppose it was designed to inspire students to organize their notes, which much like the attraction to horses, was a concept lost on me.
I want to be on fire for God, but sometimes I feel more like the worn edges of two sticks that were furiously rubbed together but never produced a spark.