By Judith Victoria Hensley

Plain Thoughts

There are some answers to life’s challenges that only come from knocking on one door after the other. Most of us come across one situation or another in the course of our lives where we don’t know what the right answer is or what the right solution is to our need. We try to open the right door, but it seems invisible to find.

Some people sit still and wait for the answers to land in their lap. Answers sometimes do come that way. Most often they do not. We frequently have to get up and try to find the right answer for our own circumstances.

If a person is unemployed and needs to find a job, most likely they are going to have to knock on several doors of places which are hiring before they land a job. It may be a matter of timing, or qualifications, or scheduling that keeps a person from getting the position they want. When one door closes, they simply have to knock on another.

My son has recently been looking at houses to buy. He’s checked out web sites, talked to realtors, and toured many houses. The one house he did find which he loved had an asking price way too high for the actual value of the property. So, he continues to look and entertain different possibilities.

I’ve had friends who were desperately looking for a relationship with someone compatible in the hopes of finding true, lifelong love. Time and time again they were disappointed by potential dates that turned out to be major disappointments.

We live in a complicated world. Sometimes there are too many choices. Sometimes access is too easy. At times there are so many possibilities, a person doesn’t know where to start. The secret is to knock on the first door. If it doesn’t open, then knock on the next one and on down the line until the right door opens.

I once had a dream of a long corridor filled with identical doors. I had no idea which door I should knock on or hope to walk through. So, I tried one door and it didn’t open to my touch. I went to the next one and it didn’t budge. On I went down the line of doors and back again. It was very frustrating. But when I looked on the opposite wall of the corridor, there was one door. I turned the handle and it opened slightly. It didn’t matter how hard I pushed the door only opened a little bit. Gradually, I realized that it was opening, but the progress was so small, I had missed it.

At times, this is how we feel about our future. We want to beat the doors down until we can see what’s on the other side. When one begins to open and give us a glimpse of hope that we’ve found the right door, we try to force it open prematurely, when what we need to be satisfied with is that we found the door that was unlocked and opened to our touch.

Even the Bible’s wisdom instructs us that is necessary to knock. “Ask and it shall be given unto you. Seek and ye shall find. Knock and the door shall be opened unto you.” (Matthew 7:7 and Luke 11:9 KJV)

The encouragement of all these thoughts is that the doors which refuse to open are best left alone. But when the right door opens, it is well worth the wait, and worth all of our effort in seeking out that one right direction that may have seemed so hard to figure out when we first started trying to find the right door through which our adventure will begin.