One Saturday afternoon, I decided I was a big boy and could use the bathroom without anyone’s help. So I climbed the stairs, closed and locked the door behind me, and for the next few minutes felt very self-sufficient.
Then it was time to leave. I couldn’t unlock the door. I tried with every ounce of my four year-old strength, but I couldn’t do it. I panicked. I felt like, “I might spend le rest of my life in this bathroom.” My parents—and likely the neighbors—heard my desperate scream. Are you okay?” Mother shouted through the door she couldn’t open from the outside. “Did you fall? Have you hit your head?”
I can’t unlock the door!” I yelled. “Get me out of here! I wasn’t aware of it right then, but Dad raced down the stairs, got the ladder leaned it against the side of the house just beneath the bathroom window. With adult strength He pried it open, then climbed into my prison, walked past me, and with that same strength, turned the lock and opened the door.
“Thanks, Dad,” I said—and ran out to play.
That’s how I thought the Christian life was supposed to work. When I get stuck in a tight place, I should do all I can to free myself. When I can’t, I should pray. Then God shows up. He hears my cry—“Get out of here! I want to play!”- and opens the door to the blessings I desire.
Sometimes he does. But now, no longer a child, I’m realizing the Christian life doesn’t work that way. And I wonder, are any of us content with God? Do we even like him when he doesn’t open the door we most want opened – when a marriage doesn’t heal, when our kids rebel, when friends betray, when financial reverses threaten our comfortable way of life, when health worsens despite much prayer, when loneliness intensifies and depression deepens, when ministries die?
God has climbed through the small window into my dark room. But he doesn’t walkout by me to turn the lock that I couldn’t budge. Instead, he sits down on the bathroom floor and says, “Come sit with me!” He seems to think that climbing into the room to be with me matters more than letting me out to play.
I don’t always see it that way. “Get me out of here!” I scream. If you love me unlock the door!”
Larry Crabb from The Pressure’s Off, Waterbrook Press, 2002, pp.222-223
Dear friend, the choice is ours. Either we keep asking God to give us what we think will make us happy- to escape our darkroom and run to the playground of blessings – or accept His invitation to sit with Him, for now, perhaps in darkness and to seize the opportunity to know Him better and to better represent Him to a very dark and hopeless world.
Join us next time as we see explore what do when you’re lonely?
