Joining the community today at Five Minute Friday with a quick take on the word “release”. Won’t you join me there and read what others have to say?

There are no little girls in my life at the moment, so watching the movie “Frozen” was a guilty, grown-up girl indulgence for me.

Who’d have though I would find life lessons in animation?

That song, the one that keeps whirling around in our heads after it’s sung, the one that’s been lip-synced across the internet. Yeah, that one.

How do you do that when you’re a sixty-something with a lifetime of stuff you need to release? How do you let your hair down, fling your arms wide and embrace who you really are, not who you’ve been telling yourself you should be for the past six decades?

The moral, for me at least, of “Frozen” is that when we let go of things in our lives that bind us, we open the door to other great possibilities. When we no longer let circumstances beyond our control determine how we will live, when we release ourselves from self-imposed bondage, we give ourselves freedom to embrace the good that’s been around us the whole time.

We can live a life of regret, a life informed by the “should haves” and “could haves” or we can live this one life we “do have” — a life that’s authentic, optimistic, full of gratitude for every ounce of good that’s left in it.

Now that I’ve done the difficult work of releasing myself from past mistakes, I’m no longer frozen by regret. It’s a beautiful place to live.

I was honored to share a guest post this week at my friend Jamelle Godlewski’s blog, Reason4Hope. Jamelle operates an important ministry in my hometown that brings hope to the entire community. Read my post “Waiting….waiting…..waiting” by jumping over to her Web site here.