Locked doors

This past Thursday was parent/teacher conferences at school from, get this: 5:30 - 6:30 p.m.! Can't complain. All teachers are assigned a room in which to be for conferences (we don't have our own classrooms in Hungary), and parents look at the listing of names and rooms to determine where they need to go to find their child's teacher.

I arrived to find I was to be in room 126 with one other teacher. Parents were mingling around, and I looked for the key. There was no key to be found in the school...so, the door remained locked and darkened. The other teacher who was supposed to be there had found another room, displaced the teachers who were supposed to be in there, and proceeded with her conferences. I decided to plant myself on the bench outside the darkened classroom and as parents came to inquire, I was there.

I watched as parents arrived, walked up to the door, tried the handle, saw it was locked and darkened, and yet some of them stood there, continuing to wait...it seemed that maybe somehow, miraculously, the door would open...or something. Others tried two or three times, looked around, and walked off. Others tried, then asked those standing nearby if they knew anything about the teachers who were supposed to be in that room.

Lots of reactions to closed, locked doors and darkened rooms. "But they are supposed to be here!" "You can't change things on me, I cannot handle that change!" "But the sheet SAYS room 126, so I'm going to wait here!"

The teachers were still available, just in different places...they had not changed, they remained the same...but it took some openness on the parents' parts to realize that maybe they had to do something "out of the ordinary" or something "they weren't used to doing" in order to meet the teachers. They may have had to shift their paradigm to see things from a different perspective...to experience parent/teacher conferences. Of course they could still meet with the "unchanged" teachers...but for some, it was VERY uncomfortable to have to "change" locations.

Interestingly, I think that for some followers of Jesus, it becomes uncomfortable when God shows up in a different place. He's not changed, but He's drawing us to Himself, the unchanging God, in a new location, and we may have to change our thinking about how "things are supposed to be" with Him, because He is in the business of taking us to new places with Himself, and He sometimes, or often, does that by making us a bit uncomfortable. He doesn't want us standing at the locked door, stuck in the ways we are comfortable functioning in...rather He wants us to seek Him with all our heart, mind, soul and strength, and that may mean going to uncomfortable, unfamiliar places.

Sometimes He doesn't ask us to understand; He asks us to trust Him; because if we understood, then we wouldn't have to have faith in Him, we could have faith in our understanding, and to have faith in anything but Him alone could lead us into idolatry.