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31 Days: Door


I know this isn't the best photo but I thought it was such a coincidence that this was October's image on my Mary Engeldark calendar that I wanted to show it in its original state.

On October 1, I was sitting in the Buffalo airport, jotting down ideas for 31 Days while waiting for my flight home. For the word door, I wrote down "they open as well as close." As if it was a sign, when I flipped my calendar from September to October, this is what I found.

When I was a kid, I had the game "Mystery Date." You picked an outfit by drawing color-coded cards, then spun the handle on a plastic door to reveal whether your outfit matched the date's behind the door.You kept spinning until you got the match you needed, while trying to avoid the "dud."


What if life is like that? What if we can keep opening the closed doors to reveal new opportunities for our life? What if we can keep opening the doors until we get a match to what we want? And even if  we reveal a "dud," we can close that door and try again.

We seem to be taught that closed doors are endings. There's even a saying, "When God closes a door, He opens a window." But what if the closed doors are just a different beginning than we expected?

I thought my divorce was a closed door, that it meant I was locked out of the life I had imagined for myself. As the years go by, I can now see that even though the door closed on my marriage, it didn't close on my life. I have opened the door to a church home, to a hotel room in Paris, and to this blog. I don't think I would have stood in those doorways if X hadn't closed the door on our life together.

So if you have closed doors in your life, remember, when life shuts a door, open it again. It's a door, that's how it works.

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  1. ~Maxine~October 14, 2018 at 7:49 AM

    Very beautifully put. I think, even when you know this, it is good to see written in black and white. Thank you for sharing this. And I love your take on this 31 days.
    Your neighbor on the FMF 31-days #5

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