When Willow comes to visit, we make sure all the doors are closed. My great granddaughter is an exuberant and active toddler. And she loves open doors. When a door is open, she’s ready to check it out! So the pantry door and cupboard doors, the bathroom door and bedroom doors are all kept closed. But if I go to my room when she is around, as soon as I open that door, she is right there with me, looking forward to going through it! To her an open door is an invitation and an opportunity. And indeed it is!

J. Wesley Clark was a minister. When he heard about a very small church in a very small town that needed a pastor, he and his wife decided to take a drive to see exactly where this church was located. As they drove past the church building, they noticed the front door of the church was wide open. God spoke to their hearts, That open door is for you. I was eleven years old when our new pastor shared his experience with us, and it has stayed with me. I loved the fact that God used a literal open door to show this man the open door waiting for him in his future.

The Lord opened a door of opportunity for me. –2 Corinthians 2:12 There is a wide-open door for a great work here! –1 Corinthians 16:9

There are several wonderful doors mentioned in the Bible. In the Old Testament book of Hosea, God sets before his people a “door of hope” and in the book of Acts there is offered to us a “door of faith”. But most exciting of all is when Jesus Himself declares: “I am the door. If anyone enters by Me, he will be saved.”-John 10:9 These doors are not locked and barred. They are an invitation from God Himself to all of us. An open door for us to enter.

The doors that lead us to God are of utmost importance. We don’t want to neglect them! But we have other open doors set before us as well. Doors of opportunity and direction. Will we go through them with confidence? Or does fear hold us back from something that God has planned for us? As we look for guidance in our daily living, we need to check out those open doors.

Sometimes open doors may be hard to recognize. We get so focused on one direction, our own ideas and set plans, that we miss the other opportunities available to us. When hard times come our way and circumstances are not to our liking, we keep looking at the door that is shut instead of finding another door that just might be open!

Often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one that has been opened for us. –Helen Keller

I hope that Willow keeps her enthusiasm for open doors. That as she grows older she will continue to look for the adventure that is on the other side of that door. For that matter, I want that kind of attitude, too! I don’t want to miss out on an adventure or overlook an opportunity by failing to go through an open door that God has put in front of me. How about you?

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