Three days.
That was how much time separated gaining a new client and losing my job.
I had already begun building Westlake Development Group, my little consulting business that had somehow gone from an idea to three clients. I was doing work I loved, and something new clearly took shape.
And, I still had my job. I still had the security behind the “what if” of new ventures—a steady and predictable paycheck.
Granted, I had reduced my hours with the ministry I worked for and had stepped away from my director role, but the employment door wasn’t completely closed yet. The plan was to close it next year after a little more time to build the new business.
But apparently, I wasn’t going to be the one to close it.
The call came. They weren’t able to keep me on payroll but did offer to contract with me for some side work. This meant the organization that had been my employer would become something entirely different—client number four.
Within three days, one chapter grew and another ended.
Do We Ask God to Close Doors?
We talk a lot about asking God to open doors.
I’m beginning to think we don’t talk nearly enough about the courage required to close a door.
Or maybe it’s me. As a middle child in the birth order, I tend to avoid conflict and like things moving along smoothly. So drastic change and endings can make me uncomfortable.
But by now, I should be something of an expert on change. I’ve moved to Africa and back, worked in different states and countries, and moved twenty-four times during my married life. I know how to pack a box. I know how to walk into a room where I don’t know anyone. And I’ve come to understand that eventually the strange grocery store becomes your grocery store and the unfamiliar road becomes the one you drive down on autopilot.
Oh yeah, I’ve encountered a few closed doors in my life. But there are some doors I still keep cracked open long after the change has taken place.
My children leaving for college is one of them and this happened years ago. They grew up, launched, and built lives of their own, which is exactly what we raised them to do.
Still, I miss the energy teenagers brought into our home. I miss the noise and celebrations and people coming through the door. I miss the random deep conversations that somehow began at the most inconvenient hour of the night. I don’t want those years back exactly. I love the adults my children have become. But every once in a while, I find myself peeking through that old door with a sense of longing.
Maybe that’s part of what makes endings difficult. Closing a door can feel like we’re declaring that what happened on the other side no longer matters.
But I’m learning this is not what closing doors or better described, seasons means.
The truth? Something can be finished without becoming insignificant.
Some Endings are Painful
The death of a loved one or friend is a very painful ending.
Death isn’t simply a new season we need to learn to embrace. Scripture calls death an enemy. Paul writes, “The last enemy that will be abolished is death” (1 Corinthians 15:26). Death tears someone we love from the life we expected to share with them. We know God has reasons and seasons for each of our lives and life span, but we still don’t need to pretend death is somehow prettier than it is. Death is a foe not a friend.
And yet even in the sorrow, pain, and grief of death, God asks us to keep walking.
He doesn’t expect us to close the door on the person as though he or she never existed. And the Lord doesn’t want us to stop remembering or to hurry along our grieving. But eventually, He asks us to trust that although part of our life ended with our loved one, He has not finished leading us through ours.
Perhaps the next door isn’t God saying, Move on, but the next door is God saying, Come with Me. I am still here.
Unwanted Endings
There are other endings we never would have chosen. A marriage ends. A job disappears. Friendships change. A diagnosis divides life into before and after or the house where we raised our family belongs to someone else now.
Sometimes we see an ending approaching and fight it with everything we have. Other times somebody else shuts the door before we even realize we’re standing in the doorway.
Nothing about these situations is easy.
Ecclesiastes tells us there is “an appointed time for everything” (Ecclesiastes 3:1). There is a time to give birth and a time to die. A time to plant and a time to uproot. A time to weep and a time to laugh. A time to mourn and a time to dance.
We love some of those seasons considerably more than others. But perhaps the changing seasons are teaching us something we could learn no other way. Isn’t it true that it is the hard and painful that we learn the most valuable lessons?
Nothing here stays and this is a difficult truth.
But we spend so much of our lives trying to make things stay. We take pictures. Traditions become sacred. Familiar places are more comfortable than the unfamiliar. We work hard to build homes and careers and relationships that feel solid beneath our feet.
And while there’s nothing wrong with that, the fact that all of this will end at some point in our journeys is inevitable. Our seasons are not meant to be our constants.
There is only one constant in our universe and I believe our necessary endings are there to not only grow us spiritually, but to teach us who this one constant is.
“For I, the LORD, do not change” (Malachi 3:6).
But God
Perhaps this is all part of how He prepares us for eternity. Every ending loosens our grip, just a little, on the idea that permanence can be found while we’re on this planet. The children grow up. Careers end. Houses change hands. Bodies age. People we love leave us. The seasons in our lives come and go and sometimes before we’re ready.
But … and this is the good news … one day, even endings will end.
Revelation gives us a glimpse of a world where death, mourning, crying, and pain are gone, and God says, “Behold, I am making all things new” (Revelation 21:4–5).
But we are not to the new “new” yet.
For now, we live in seasons we welcome and seasons we grieve.
And maybe courage under pressure sometimes looks surprisingly like a hand twisting a new doorknob while remaining grateful for everything that happened in the room behind us.
I’m trusting in the Lord who is already in the room ahead. Scary? You betcha! But the Lord calms my heart as twist the knob of the new door in front of me.
I’m drinking from my cup of courage under pressure just like you are.
Laurie
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