Learning From Open Doors

We all can learn from open doors. No door is so small or ordinary that they cannot be one of God’s open doors. The doors available to us can often confuse us. We think our work, our accomplishments, or our family should turn out a certain way, but unfortunately they seldom do.  But life depends less on which doors you go through – your expectations, your plans, or your desires than on how you go through them.

Open doors can reveal ourselves
In choosing doors wisely you must be an expert on you, but not in a selfish way. You need to be aware of how God has wired you, your interest, your values and skills. You also need to become aware of those parts of yourself that you wish most to avoid. Discerning open doors requires an awareness of the world inside of you. A lack of self- awareness is a crippling handicap that no amount of talent can overcome.

Strengths and weaknesses
If I’m going to understand which door God is likely to set before me I need to have some sense of what are my strengths, weaknesses and interests. Knowing these things will help prevent a lot of detours. Author Marcus Buckingham notes that your strengths are not simply what you’re good at and your weaknesses are not simply what your bad at. You’ll have some activities in your life that you might even be pretty effective at doing, but they drain you.

Marcus goes on… “What do you call that?  Something you’d been blessed with lots of ability to do well, but cursed with no appetite for it… You call that a weakness.  A weakness is any activity that leaves you feeling weaker after you do it. It doesn’t matter how good you are it and how much money you make doing it, if doing it drains you of energy, you’d be crazy to build your career around it.” ‘The Truth about You’ p.41

It is better to acknowledge that I walked through a wrong door than to spend the rest of my life in the wrong place. Ouch. The Apostle Paul said, “We are what he made us, created in Christ Jesus for good works which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life” Ephesians 2:10 (NRSV).

The God who made you also made the doors for you to go through and the things for you to do.  Generally, he will give you not only the skills, but also the interest to do what he asks you to do over the long haul.