Recently a teen friend, Tania Sithole, said something to the effect of, "When one door closes, God opens another. You just have to have faith". I started thinking about how we react to closed doors.
Life is never a stone wall with nowhere to go, even though it occasionally looks and feels that way. The open door may not be directly in front of us on the path we were headed down, but it's there. It may be to the side, or we may need to back track a bit and try another path, but there's always an open door.
Some of us, though, have a tendency to stay at the closed door. We might keep knocking or ringing the bell. We might try to knock it down. We might just stare at it dumbly. Or fall down and weep. But we won't go anywhere until we quit worrying about that closed door.
Others just turn back, giving up all hope of going forward, or at least anywhere they want to go. "The door was shut, I'm doomed". Well, yeah, if you choose to be doomed you can be, but it's a silly choice.
And that's what a lot of us miss, that we do have choices. We can choose to demand that things go our way every time, and get nowhere we really want to go (unless we're self-centered to the point of absurdity), or we can choose to make the best of what shows up-- and to look around to see what's there.
While you're at it, you might want to choose to think about where all those open doors come from. Do they really just pop randomly out of an impersonal universe, or is it possible someone loves you and is offering you a way into something better?
