Doors
Last Sunday the Wilshire Youth Choir had its annual spaghetti lunch and silent auction, which is always a great event, and it took me back a few years to when LeAnn and I bid on a mahogany house door. We were months away from getting married and had decided to build a new house together. So when we saw the door at the auction, we thought, “Why not? Every house has a door. A front door is a great place to start.”
Life is full of doors and windows. Sometimes they open wide and invite us in, and sometimes they slam shut in our face. God does a lot of the opening and closing, but sometimes we can miss that if we’re not paying attention. We can stubbornly push through a closed door and end up somewhere we don’t belong. Or, we can spend our entire life huddled in one room and never know what lies just beyond the open threshold – new opportunities, relationships, adventures, memories.
Jesus said, “In my Father’s house are many rooms . . . I am going there to prepare a place for you.” Metaphorically or not, those rooms have doors, and we have to be ready and willing to walk through them when we see them open. We have to be attentive and trusting too.
Even so, sometimes, all we get is the door. We walk through it and find an empty lot on the other side. Instead of backing out of it, we have to roll up our sleeves and do the hard work of building the home or life that it will ultimately lead to. But Jesus was a carpenter, so we have pretty good help if we’ll let him.
By the way, we didn’t get the door that year at the auction. Someone out-bid us. That means the youth got more money, and that’s a good thing. Meanwhile, there have been many more doors to choose from. God is good with doors.