Wednesday, June 5, 2013

In the hallway...

I'm tired of being in this in between time.   I believe it's all serving a purpose, but I don't like it.  I want my house to be sold so I can move to Nashville and begin the next part of the journey.

Of course, as I wrote that, the thought came to me that this is the next part of the journey!  I'm exactly where I'm supposed to be, right here, right now.  I'm in the hallway.

What does that mean?  A number of years ago I attended a small non-denominational church on a fairly regular basis.  Because the church didn't have a full time minister, each week they had a guest speaker, sometimes a visiting minister, sometimes a lay person.  I never knew what to expect when I walked in.

One Sunday the speaker was a minister from a church in Ohio.   Her sermon was about times of transition.   She reminded us that each time one door closes, another opens.  However, she also reminded us that God's timing can be quite different from our own, and it's not unusual for there to be a period of time between the closing of one door and the opening of the next.   She suggested we see that period in between as being  'in the hallway,' making our way from the door that closed to the door that would open.

According to her, it's a very appropriate and much needed place to be. For us, it's a time to look back over what we are leaving behind, grieve the loss of what was, and open ourselves to the excitement and possibility of things to come, even if we don't really know what those things are.   She said this was a time of preparation, and that everything we did here would help us as we moved forward. 

But for me, there was an even more important observation.  She said this time in the hallway is also a time for God to bring together all the various aspects that needed to come together to enable that new door to open!  And even if that hallway seemed much longer than we expected it or wanted it to be, it was exactly as long as it needed to be for God to put all the pieces in place for our next move.

She did warn us, however,  not to 'camp out' in the hallway: not to make ourselves so comfortable in that in between space that we didn't want to leave it when the next door opened.  Somehow I think I believed that if I accepted I am exactly where I'm supposed to be, that I should be comfortable being here.  But maybe those two things don't necessarily go hand in hand.  Maybe I can trust in God's timing and still be uncomfortable.  In fact, as I remember that sermon, it seems that I'm almost better off being uncomfortable, so that when the next door finally does open, I'm ready to walk through it.



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