Written By Jennifer McPherson

This truth came to me in the most unexpected—and honestly, the silliest—way. I was watching a movie. Jesus Revolution, to be exact. There’s a scene where a young man is baptized, and something about it gripped me. He didn’t come to the Lord with clenched fists full of assumptions or self-protection. He came with hands wide open.

For weeks, I couldn’t shake that image. Why did it stay with me?
Because what I was seeing was the essence of how we must come to the Lord if we ever hope to live in peace.

Open hands.
Letting go of what doesn’t align with His heart.
Postured to receive everything He longs to pour out.
This—this—is humility.

When we come to Him open-handed, He can use us in ways we could never imagine. We are no longer tethered to the weight of this world because we’ve stopped clinging to anything but Him.

When I reflect on my life these past 42 years, I realize something:
I have always been a holder.
Growing up in chaos, instability, and uncertainty taught me to grip whatever felt safe, even if it wasn’t. I was always searching for stable ground—never realizing the whole time that He was the stable ground I had been seeking.

The truth is, as long as my hands were clenched around something temporal, I was never fully positioned to receive what He had for me in the moment.

This idea pulled my heart back to Isaiah 43:18–19—“Forget the former things; do not remember the things of old.”
It doesn’t mean we discard the past. It means we hold it loosely.
We keep an open-handed posture that allows God to give and God to take as He leads.

Because the moments I have felt most content, most free, most aligned with Him, were the moments I finally released my grip—and embraced the reality that I am the one being held.

This entire year has been a season of transition for me. A crossing over. A shifting from this to that. And if I’m honest, there were still parts of me that wanted to hold on—to people, to places, to dreams, to familiar rhythms that felt comfortable.

But today…
Today I release all of it back to Him.

All the things.
All the people.
All the places I’ve seen.
Every dream. Every joy. Every seed He ever planted in me—
Lord, it all goes back to You.

And so I stand here now—
On ground You’ve already cultivated,
Ground not yet built upon,
Ground that is holy because You are in it—

And I say:

Lord, my hands are open, and so is my heart.
Here I am, Lord—send me.