Shuttered Doors

Driving up Emery Street beside the graveyard, up from Carter’s Bottom, by the Flats, before today’s troubles fogged my ability to observe, there stood sentinel-like, one lone whitewashed marker, stark as a shuttered door. The stone pierced my eye before its message wakened me to the truth it wished to speak. Its thousand words rested and turned me to that inner place where God often speaks when I am low enough to listen.

Jesus said, “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs which indeed appear beautiful outwardly, but inside are full of dead men’s bones and all uncleanness.”

Only a self-righteous man uses rationale as a reason, another way to point to his own good as he perceives it. And who hasn’t pointed to his own good, if not for others, but in the least for himself? Where does that lead us but to those chosen comforters, those little man-made, tangible gods?

How easily I got it wrong. In an effort to be faithful, too often I saw God, not as He wished to be seen, but as I wished to see Him. God didn’t have all of me because I hadn’t given all of me to Him. Attempting to contain Him in the six-inch space between my ears so I could segment Him from the rest of my life, I acted as a gatekeeper, a bouncer checking I.D., a jailer holding his captured, a child drawing a line in the sand. I only let Him out when safety allowed or let Him in when awkwardness wouldn’t embarrass me. This frame allowed me to spend time peering over the fence wanting and living an unmirrored life.

And what about that fence, with its seemingly benign choices, its “my life” mentality and “I’ll tend to God later when I’ve got time, I’ll do it my way, does He really mean that” motivation to every free-will decision on the other side? Obedience to self is so easy.

Those thousand words churned inside me, decibeled their way into my consciousness just as my unworthiness waned toward confidence. When I thought I knew life’s sum, they said to me to desire wisdom is to desire only her and nothing else outside of her. And when I heard her, she reminded me salvation is as much an answered prayer as an eternal day in heaven.

It’s a long way from one to one thousand and back. My spirits lifted. To those who hear, God calls us into our gift. If my free will could distance God from me, it should also bring me close. But free only brought me so far. I realized my will had to prefer God, to seek His will and for mine to become His and God had a say in all this. What we possess must submit what is given to us by Him who created us.

Jesus said love your neighbor as self, be careful how you whitewash your tomb…

beware of shuttered doors.

“Those who have ears to hear, let them hear” (Matthew 11:15, NKJV).

 

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