Letting Go and Letting God — What the Phrase Actually Means
⏱ 14 min read
The phrase has been embroidered on cushions. It has been printed on coffee mugs in cursive script and sold next to candles. It has been used in well-meaning conversations with grieving people in a way that left the grieving person feeling that her grief was the evidence she had not yet let go properly. It has been said, with the best of intentions, to women in impossible circumstances who needed practical help and were given a slogan instead. Let go and let God. Five words that have done both extraordinary spiritual good and a fair amount of pastoral damage, depending on who was saying them and to whom.
So the question you are bringing — what does let go and let God mean? — is not a small or naive question. It is the question of a woman who has heard the phrase a thousand times and is finally asking, properly, what it actually means underneath the cushion-embroidery. What did the old contemplatives mean when they pointed in the direction this phrase now gestures vaguely toward? What did they ask of you, on the Tuesday, that is more honest than the slogan version?
This is the slow read. If you want a daily home for it — small, scripture-anchored, without the over-warmth that the bad version of this teaching produces — the Prayer Journal for Women is the 140-day companion the rest of this essay is the opening pages of. The phrase itself does not appear in the older texts. The phrase was a twentieth-century summary of a posture the contemplative tradition had been describing for centuries — and the older language is, as is usually the case, both gentler and more demanding than the summary.
What it actually means, in plain Andrew Murray, is stop white-knuckling, and let yourself be held. That sentence is the corrective. The rest of this essay is the slow unfolding of why it is the corrective, and what it looks like on the day you actually have to do it.
The first thing the phrase does not mean
It does not mean stop caring.
This needs to be said first, clearly, because the misuse of let go and let God most often functions as a kind of pious instruction to disengage — to stop feeling the weight of what you are carrying, to stop thinking about the situation, to stop praying about it because praying about it is evidence you have not let go. None of this is what the contemplative tradition meant. The woman in the gospels who came up to Jesus about her daughter did not let go of the daughter. She brought the daughter with her. The letting go was not the letting go of the love. It was the letting go of the illusion that the love alone could carry the weight without God.
This is the distinction Andrew Murray, more carefully than almost any teacher in the contemplative tradition, kept making. He saw that the soul which has been told to let go in the slogan sense often hears the instruction as a command to stop loving — and either does so, and becomes the cold version of itself, or refuses, and lives under a low-grade guilt about not being able to let go properly. Both responses are bad readings of what the phrase, in its proper sense, was always pointing to.
Murray’s correction comes in a passage from Abide in Christ that is one of the clearest pieces of pastoral writing on this question in the whole of the late-Victorian devotional tradition:
“So we shall gaze on its blessedness, until desire be inflamed, and the will with all its energies be roused to claim and possess the unspeakable blessing. Come, my brethren, and let us day by day set ourselves at His feet, and meditate on this word of His, with an eye fixed on Him alone. Let us set ourselves in quiet trust before Him, waiting to hear His holy voice — the still small voice that is mightier than the storm that rends the rocks — breathing its quickening spirit within us, as He speaks: ‘Abide in me.’ The soul that truly hears Jesus Himself speak the word, receives with the word the power to accept and to hold the blessing He offers.”
— Andrew Murray, Abide in Christ
Read it twice. The verbs Murray is asking for are not let go verbs. They are receiving verbs. Gaze. Set ourselves at His feet. Meditate. Fix the eye on Him. Set ourselves in quiet trust. Wait to hear His voice. Every verb is the soul making itself available, not the soul detaching from what it cares about. The letting-go that Murray is asking for is not the loosening of your grip on the people you love. It is the loosening of your grip on the being-in-charge of the situation those people are inside of.
That distinction is everything. Let go and let God does not mean stop feeling the love. It means stop trying to be God for the situation the love is involved in. You can carry the situation to His feet — Murray insists you do, day by day — and what you are letting go of, while you carry it, is the small managing self that has been treating the situation as if it were yours to fix.
The second thing the phrase does not mean
It does not mean the feeling will go away.
This is the cruellest version of the misuse, and it is the one most likely to land on the woman in genuine pain. If you really let go, you would feel peace. This is said to the bereaved mother, the wife in the impossible marriage, the daughter watching a parent decline. The implication is that if she is still in turmoil, she has not yet let go properly — and the turmoil therefore becomes evidence of her insufficient surrender, which adds shame to the suffering and produces, eventually, a soul that hates itself for being unable to manufacture the peace the slogan promised.
Andrew Murray, who lived through real suffering and pastored people through their own, did not promise that letting go would make the pain disappear. He promised, more honestly and more usefully, that letting go would change what was holding you while the pain was still there. The pain might not lift. The grip changes. You stop being held by the situation; you start being held by Him. The situation is still in the room. But you are no longer alone in the room with it.
This is what he means in the longer passage that completes the previous quotation:
“Let this truth, accepted under the teaching of the Spirit in faith, remove every vestige of fear, as if abiding in Christ were a burden and a work. In the light of His life in the Father, let it henceforth be to you a blessed rest in the union with Him, an overflowing fountain of joy and strength. To abide in His love, His mighty, saving, keeping, satisfying love, even as He abode in the Father’s love — surely the very greatness of our calling teaches us that it never can be a work we have to perform; it must be with us as with Him, the result of the spontaneous outflowing of a life from within, and the mighty inworking of the love from above. What we only need is this: to take time and study the divine image of this life of love set before us in Christ. We need to have our souls still unto God, gazing upon that life of Christ in the Father until the light from heaven falls on it, and we hear the living voice of our Beloved whispering gently to us personally the teaching He gave to the disciples. Soul, be still and listen; let every thought be hushed until the word has entered your heart too: ‘Child!’”
— Andrew Murray, Abide in Christ
Slow down. The promise is not the disappearance of the difficulty. The promise is the union. A blessed rest in the union with Him. You can be in pain and in union with Him at the same time. The union is what let go and let God was always pointing to. The peace, when it comes, is the peace of the union — the peace of not being alone with what you are carrying — not the peace of the situation having been resolved.
Notice also what Murray asks at the very end. Soul, be still and listen; let every thought be hushed until the word has entered your heart too: “Child!” That is the whole of the letting-go practice, in one sentence. Be still. Let every thought hush. Wait for the word — that one word — Child — to enter the heart. The letting-go is the laying-down of the adult-management posture so that the child posture can come back. The slogan version of let go and let God makes it sound like an act of mature spiritual will. Murray makes it sound, more accurately, like the lowering of an over-grown-up soul back into the place of being held by a Father.
If you have been feeling spiritually dry for a stretch, part of what is happening is exactly this. The adult-management has been doing the work that the child-receiving was meant to do. The dryness is, sometimes, the protest of a soul that has not been allowed to be small enough to hear Child spoken to it for too long.
A short bodily pause
Stop reading. Sit in a chair. Place both feet flat on the floor. Let both hands rest, palms upward, on your thighs — the unguarded posture, not the protective fist. Take one slow breath. Then, gently, without performing anything, let yourself hear the word Child. Not as a sentence you have to believe. As a name you are being called by. Stay with it for thirty seconds. The soul that has been doing the adult work for too long does not lower itself easily. The body lowering itself — the palms opening, the feet grounding, the breath slowing — is the soul’s slow practice of letting itself be called Child again. You are not asked to feel anything in particular. You are asked to be there for the calling.
The third thing the phrase does not mean
It does not mean do nothing.
This is the misuse that has done a particular kind of damage to women, and it deserves naming directly. Let go and let God has been used, more than once, as the spiritual cover-story for the woman who needed to act and was told instead to be passive. It has been used to keep her in jobs she should have left, in marriages where she should have asked for help, in family situations where she needed to put down a boundary and was told that the boundary was evidence of her insufficient trust. None of that is what the phrase, properly read, was ever pointing to.
Andrew Murray himself, in the very passages where he is at his most insistent about the rest and union of abiding, also keeps reminding the reader that the abiding is the source of action, not its substitute. In another passage from Abide in Christ:
“At Thy bidding I take Thy yoke; I undertake the duty without delay; I abide in Thee. Let each consciousness of failure only give new urgency to the command, and teach us to listen more earnestly than ever till the Spirit again give us to hear the voice of Jesus saying, with a love and authority that inspire both hope and obedience, ‘Child, abide in me.’ That word, listened to as coming from Himself, will be an end of all doubting — a divine promise of what shall surely be granted.”
— Andrew Murray, Abide in Christ
I take Thy yoke. I undertake the duty without delay. These are not the verbs of a soul that has been told to disengage. These are the verbs of a soul that has accepted its assignment — the work, the difficult conversation, the practical step the situation requires — and is taking it up while abiding. The letting-go is what frees the soul to act well, because it is no longer acting from white-knuckled self-management. The action becomes calmer, clearer, more loving. It does not stop being action.
This is what let go and let God was always meant to free you for, properly understood. Not for passivity. For acting from union instead of from anxiety. For doing the next thing because it is the next thing to do, rather than because you are panicked about what happens if you don’t. The difference is felt in the body. The action performed from anxiety has the white-knuckled quality. The action performed from abiding has the receiving the next assignment from Him quality. Both look the same from the outside, sometimes. The interior is entirely different.
This is the same posture you may have been practising without naming it. The let it go mom journal walks the same instinct from a different angle — the slow page-by-page work of naming what you are done carrying, so that what remains in your hands is what you were actually meant to hold. The Christian women’s study guide for going slow with one book is the patient cousin to the white-knuckled fast-read approach to scripture. And the daily prayer journal that holds the asks you’re embarrassed to pray is the small daily home for the corner-by-corner handing-over the practice actually requires.
The plain reading: what the phrase actually means
So, in plain Murray, what does let go and let God mean?
It means let go of the part of the situation that is not yours to hold. The outcome. The other person’s choice. The future you cannot guarantee. The version of the story you have been writing in your head, where if you can just manage one more variable, the situation will resolve. The letting-go is of the management. Not of the love, the praying, the practical acting, the staying engaged. Of the being in charge.
It means let God do the part of the situation that is His. The interior work in the other person’s heart. The orchestration of circumstance. The slow ripening of a story whose end you cannot see. The quiet things only He can do, in nights and in mornings, that you cannot fast-forward and cannot guarantee and cannot manage on His behalf. The letting-God is the active trust that He is, in fact, doing this — even when you cannot see the doing, even when the situation looks unchanged, even when the timeline is unbearable to you.
It means do this small lowering daily. Not once. Not as a single dramatic surrender after which you are done. Daily. Hourly, on the hard days. Each time the white-knuckled self comes back to the controls, the lowering happens again. The phrase is not a transaction. It is a posture, and the posture is the practice, and the practice is what gradually re-trains the soul to live in union rather than in management.
This is also the same teaching Augustine reaches by another road when he writes our heart is restless, until it repose in Thee, and the same teaching the companion essay on absolute surrender walks from the strict-Murray side. The next essay in the cluster on John Owen and the sin of trying to sanctify yourself is the diagnostic angle on what happens to the soul that refuses to let go in this proper sense. The four of them, read together, give the phrase back its weight without giving it back its weaponisation.
The line worth keeping near the page
If you take only one sentence from Murray into the week ahead, take this one:
“Soul, be still and listen; let every thought be hushed until the word has entered your heart too: ‘Child!’”
Write it small. Put it where you will see it on the day the white-knuckling has been worst. The day of the difficult conversation, the long worry about a child, the late-night replay of the situation you cannot resolve. The instruction is not try harder to let go. The instruction is be still, hush, listen — until you hear yourself called Child again. That hearing is the letting-go. The lowering of the adult-management posture so the child-posture can return is the whole of the practice, in one image.
You will not stay there. The white-knuckling will come back. Murray will tell you so himself. The point is not that you arrive at a permanent letting-go. The point is that you now know the word let go means be still and listen for “Child,” and so the next time you notice the grip tightening, you can lower your hands again, and listen again, and let the word land again. Ten thousand small lowerings, across a life, is what the phrase actually means. The cushion-embroidery version was always a translation of this. The original is gentler. It is also harder. And it is finally honest — about the love that does not go away, the pain that does not always lift, the action that still has to be taken, and the Child the soul is called by, underneath all of it, the whole time.
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A 140-day home for the practice
The slow practice we just walked has its 140-day form in Prayer Journal for Women. One short page each day. Scripture pre-printed. Space for the small honest sentence of the corner being lowered today. Built for the woman who is tired of the cushion-embroidery version and wants the slower, more honest practice the old contemplatives kept walking.
It is the format of this essay made into a daily companion, so the page you sit down at tomorrow already has a shape and you do not have to invent one from scratch.
The Everspring Prayer Journal for Women walks Murray’s posture across 140 days — short, scripture-anchored, with space for the small honest work of being still until the word “Child” enters the heart again. For the woman who is done with the slogans and is ready, slowly, to let herself be held.
