HOLDING ON LOOSELY
DANA KNOX WRIGHT
Publisher: Carpenter’s Son / Clovercroft Publishing
Date of Publication: August 24, 202
Number of Pages: 208 pages
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SYNOPSIS
Helicopter parents. Control freaks. Perfectionists. Intolerants. Over-consumers. Social media junkies. We all fit in there somewhere. Read one woman’s stories of clinging, turning loose, and becoming free.
We are overly busy helicopter parents, control freaks, perfectionists, intolerants, over-consumers and social media junkies–who worry, fear, laugh less, and always want more. In the midst of it, we wonder what it would feel like to open our hands and turn loose of all of it.
In HOLDING ON LOOSELY: Opening My Hands, Lightening My Load, and Seeing Something Else, author Dana Knox Wright tells stories of one who is hardwired to cling. To her children when they asked for a blessing to go. To someone else’s ideas, when she didn’t trust her own. She held on to prejudice when she would tell you she didn’t. She shut down for days while clinging to fear. She clung to youthfulness as if what would come next couldn’t be her life’s cherry on top.
In a particular season of her life, she recognized her bent to possess, to keep, to hold tightly, and to control was completely contrary to Jesus’ example. This is one woman’s history of holding on and her stories of turning loose–stories of the gentle and firm, humorous and heartbreaking ways God led her to turn loose. It is living minimally from the inside out.
REVIEW
Clueless Gent’s Rating for Holding On Loosely
When I began reading Holding On Loosely, I thought that maybe author Dana Knox Wright was a fly on the wall of my life, and she was just reporting what she saw there. So many of the things in this book had a very familiar ring to them. It was almost scary!
When the author started in on the laundry list of things she and her husband did not know about each other when they got married, it seemed like a list of unchecked boxes on my own marriage certificate.
I felt an immediate kinship with much of the prose on these pages. Sometimes it was funny – sometimes not so much. Sometimes it was a little thing that I had forgotten, such as the joy she got when picked to lead the Pledge of Allegiance in grade school. Sometimes it was something huge, such as the emotions she felt when financial disaster was looming.
I found this book to be well written and very candid. It was obvious that sometimes the author had to “dive deep” to drag things out from the closet. (That can be taken both literally and figuratively.)
“We can cling to the drought and let it do us in, or we can turn it loose and strengthen our resolve to make it through, knowing God will not leave us there. Droughts don’t last forever. They always end with abundant rainfall—rehydrating everything gone dry.”
Dana Knox Wright has a wonderful talent for seeing and understanding the little things, and then taking those concepts and applying them to the big things. Here’s what I mean: during a hot Texas summer and drought, she noticed a lone zinnia on her porch that clung to life as all the other plant life wilted and died from the conditions. She extrapolated that to her own life. It taught her to turn loose of drought and keep walking in the dry seasons. (She writes it much more eloquently than I paraphrased.)
I think perhaps the best thing I can say about this book is that it can urge the reader to take a step back and look at things differently. That step back can prompt positive change. Before I read this book I may have only seen the dying plants on the porch. Now I’ll be more inclined to see the one clinging to life and treasure it.
About
the Author
one overnight stay at the Llano Line Shack.
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3 thoughts on “Holding On Loosely”
This is an excellent review. The book spoke to me in much the same way it did to you, and I hope I can take away some of the gifts it offers (and hold those things like perspective TIGHTLY). Thanks for sharing.