The Five Minute Friday Free Write prompt today is “Door.”

Go!

 

So many doors.

My house has too many doors. Three front doors? For what reason?

We never could figure that one out. And so many doors within: closets and closed stairways and pantries and cupboards and even a defunct dumbwaiter door.

The trouble with too many doors is they take up space that otherwise might be more usefully employed. And they offer too many choices.

Too many choices? In a time when freedom of choice is the rallying cry?

Yes.

When people come to our house for the first time, unless they know us and we’ve told them just to come to the back door like all our close friends, they’re baffled as they stand on the porch and try to decide which door to knock on. There’s even a doorbell push button beside one door and an old-fashioned hand-turned doorbell ringer on another!

Life in this world has become like that. Now we have so many opportunities that we don’t know which of those doors to knock on either. An overwhelming burden of trying to make the right choice leaves many people wavering, uncertain, and never able to move forward, bold in a single purpose, while others make a bold choice, then when they find its outcomes are fraught with difficulties, suppose the choice must have been wrong, that “I should have chosen…” door 2 or 3 or 4 or… Some of us live in regret or jump around after all kinds of possibilities all our lives. How many college students change their major several times and never quite get their bearings even after graduation—or, from even the beginning list their major as “undeclared.”

I hesitate to tell you how old I am, but I still feel I haven’t quite figured out yet “what I want to do when I grow up”!

How about you? Do you ever get restless in your present state, thinking maybe you’re wasting your life on the wrong life choice(s)?

Too many doors. Too many choices.

Then I think of another door imagery. Jesus used it of Himself.

“I am the door,” He said, “The door that leads to life.”

We get all kinds of doubts thrown at us about choosing, and sticking to, that choice, too. But I know how real He has been in my life, of the amazing things He’s done, of His amazing love and intervening care He’s shown me, despite whatever lack of good judgment might have baffled me about all kinds of other choices.

Maybe it doesn’t really matter which morally neutral “door” we pick, if we’ve entered real Life by “the true Door.” Even if that looks  to the rest of the world like the back door!

*****