What an embarrassing moment that was! Not too long ago, I was trying to get out the door to a store. I walked up to the door, admittedly not paying attention to what was in front of me. I grabbed the handle and pushed the door. It didn’t open, so I pushed a little harder. Then I jiggled the handle.
Wouldn’t you know it…the door was a pull door! I was so embarrassed that I can’t even put it into words. My face turned red. I played it off as if it was no big deal, but that didn’t change the fact that I missed the big red sign right in front of me that said PULL.
Maybe you’ve never done that. Maybe you’ve never been so absent-minded as to miss the sign right in front of your face. But I bet there have been times in life where it felt like you were doing just that – pushing on a pull door. I think that’s sometimes what happens to followers of Jesus as they plan out their lives. This idea even affects the way we pray at times. We push and push and push our own agenda. We strive for our thoughts and ideas. We pray, even adding the whole thy will be done phrase at the end of our prayers. But in actuality, our prayers are nothing more than our own thoughts trying to change God’s mind.
The chorus of this week’s Music Monday selection is telling. When you’re upside down, then you can see it all. Sometimes it takes life to be totally thrown into a tailspin for us to see what really matters in life. Maybe it’s a health diagnosis, or a job loss that shows us that perhaps we need to pull that door right open. In our attempts to be successful and strive to be the best, we set our agendas and make our plans. We make our decisions by listening to who shouts the answers we want to hear the loudest. But perhaps instead of pushing on that door, we should allow it to open toward us.
I was recently faced with a pretty challenging decision. I was wrestling with this one. I didn’t want to make the wrong decision. In conversations with trusted friends and loved ones, I was given much advice. But in the end it was this friend telling me to stop pushing and listen to the whisper that helped me see the decision I needed to make. You see the facts of life cloud our view so often that we can’t see the bright red sign in the middle of the door that says PULL!
I’m not sure what you’re going through today, but perhaps you’d benefit from taking your hands off the door for a second. Perhaps you could gain some insight into that difficult decision if you would just pull that door instead of pushing it. You never know what God might have on the other side when you step away from your agenda and listen to his quiet whisper.
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