What Should We Let God Do?

When you pick up your cross, you’re heading for an execution.

Mel Robbins, author of The 5 Second Rule: Transform Your Life, Work, and Confidence with Everyday Courage, released another buzzworthy self-help book in December 2024 called The Let Them Theory.

Like many motivational books, this one is the child of a shocking “aha” moment. As Catherine Pearson describes it in The New York Times, on the night of [Robbins’] son Oakley’s junior prom, and “overcome by the realization that her youngest child would soon be leaving her, [Robbins] coped by micromanaging the scene. She pressured Oakley to give his date a corsage. Fretted about the weather. Worried that the teenagers hadn’t made a dinner reservation. Fed up, her daughter Kendall finally snapped: ‘Mom, if Oakley and his friends want to go to a taco bar for pre-prom, LET THEM!’”

This was the eye-opener, an epiphany of Einsteinian proportions, a Copernican revelation that altered her view of her own personal universe. Robbins writes,...