An old adage seeped into the space between my synapses this week, bandying about as if it were asking me to consider it once again. You know the saying. When God closes one door, He opens another. Of course, I believe this adage to be true. But it begs a question, “What about the closed door?”
Not wrongly, the accepted intent of this missive is to give anyone a sense of hope following some failure or loss. The emphasis is on looking forward, not backward. Who would disagree? Yet, hope is only half the adage. What must we say about the loss? Does loss serve a purpose? Does it speak beyond a lesson learned? Does it convey a deeper scriptural meaning?
Christians are called to live in hope, to rest in God’s assurance. Loss serves as the painful awakening to that hope. Loss is a severing from one existence into a new one. To paraphrase Iain McGilchrist, the landscape either says yes or no to the water, and in saying yes, the river forms. Loss is the water, our life the landscape. In saying yes to loss, accepting it, means saying yes to what God wishes to teach us. Loss calls us to listen to God. It stills us. It puts life on pause long enough to consider the meaning we were to grasp, not just earthly, but spiritually, perhaps that something missing within us. Loss is God’s way of not just calling us to introspection, but to look to Him, to come alongside Him in a way we were not before. To think loss deals some cruel twist of fate, that somehow God chooses winners and losers misses His intent.
What of the meaning, of the calling? I think loss is God’s way of coming closer to us, of calling us closer to Him. Much like a fire that damages a building, loss opens us to questioning, not of what went right or wrong, not of the cause, but of its purpose. Loss is the means by which we are examined, the means by which God purges imperfection from us. There is a redemptive and repenting message here, a turn in the river, a finding of a receiving landscape. In turning to Him, God receives us. From loss, the Christian’s journey deepens.
What is God calling us to? There is in theology the term “perfecting grace.” Perfection seems to me after all these years as something unattainable. Perfection, in God’s terms, is not something we can do but what He does for us, in us, and more powerfully, through us. This leads me to believe God is calling us to reliance, perhaps a step toward perfection. Shouldn’t this have been Adam and Eve’s response to temptation? Doesn’t reliance mean hope against loss? Shouldn’t we attempt to do what He says?
What do we do with it? Coming closer to God, living in relationship with Him means allowing Him to guide and teach us, to give to us what He desires to give. And in receiving, we share with our brothers and sisters this gift.
“For you, O God, have tested us; you have refined us as silver is refined” (Psalm 66:10, NKJV).