Posted on: 1st October 2026

Bono sings, “You’ve got to leave it all behind” (Walk On). Dolly Parton sings no more and has left behind a new company called “She’s Alive LLC” to protect her $450m estate - over which the inevitable squabbles have already begun.

When J.D.Rockefeller died they asked his accountant whether or not he knew exactly how much JDR had left behind. He replied, “Certainly, to the penny. He left everything.”

Sir Keir Starmer has been through a different transition and “leaving behind” this year. I wonder how he is? I’ve begun to realise that transitions are good practice for learning about this “leaving behind” (a couple of years ago my partner and I sold our business and this year my wife and I handed over our church to new leaders). 

I have had to leave behind a great deal of my previous “life”: lots of relationships; financial productivity; a rhythm and structure to my day; affirmation & appreciation; identities; pre-occupations of which I was hardly aware beforehand but whose loss I now feel keenly. Please don’t worry about me though – it’s just a part of life and is also a sort-of death.

In order to press the point home the Lord recently put me on a panel hosted by Stewardship where I was speaking about wealth transfer (between generations). This was unusual because, in my experience, we eschew talking about death, money and wills. 

Our reticence to speak is compounded by: (1) I don’t want to talk about death; (2) neither do I want to talk about what stuff I have got and; (3) I really, really don’t want to talk about letting other people take control of it!

But (1) Christians can speak of a better story because we need not fear death - we have already started to live an eternal life. 

Jesus said, ‘I am the resurrection and the life. The one who believes in me will live, even though they die; and whoever lives by believing in me will never die.” (John 11:25-26). 

As Aslan explains in the Last Battle, “There was a real railway accident, your father and mother and all of you are – as you used to call it in the Shadowlands – dead. The term is over: the holidays have begun. The dream is ended: this is the morning.” 

So Dolly was right!

And (2) Christians can speak of a better story because it’s not our stuff, it’s God’s.
“The earth is the Lord’s and everything in it” sings the Psalmist (24:1). The wristwatch advert goes, “You never actually own a Patek Philippe. You merely look after it for the next generation” (cue slowmo of doting father and son). 

They claim it as an eternal truth, but it isn’t, it’s half true: you are looking after it, just not for the next generation but for God.

Finally (3), Christians can speak of a better story because we need not worry about losing control (the idol of our times). 

Jesus says, again and again, “Do not worry.”  We can leave it all behind because God has promised that He has us under His protection, “I am the Lord your God who takes hold of your right hand and says to you, “Do not fear, I will help you”.

So as I go through my own transitions I am choosing to “leave it all behind”. I am learning that: after those sort-of deaths which we call transitions, life goes on (and I believe it goes on even after death); that none of what I clung to before was mine anyway, I am simply handing it back into God’s hands; and that I can trust Him to give me a joyful future because, “He is faithful and He will do it.” (1 Thessalonians 5:24).