The Lord Is My Locksmith

A malfunction in the lock of the front door to my apartment has us all locked out today.

Interesting situation. There was anger first. Pain next. Agony in total. It was a searing 42 degrees centigrade in the foyer of our building. And the wait for the locksmith to arrive seemed endless.

Finally, almost two hours later he arrived. And after a quick diagnosis concluded that the lock and the latch (one of those modern locks placed in the latch) , both had to be broken__and condemned.

We trusted his opinion and went with his advice. He started work. It took him, a trained locksmith of several decades of experience, a good hour to pry free the latch and lock combo. Although we had insisted that the door itself should not suffer any damage, he ended up scratching the entire area around the lock with his tools and also left a gaping wedge several inches above the lock, closer to the keyhole, owing to a miscued mini pickaxe heave!

We accepted his worksmanship, thanked him, paid him what he asked for as his professional charges__without a whimper__and went on with our lives.

Later on, after cooling off for a while, I thought through the entire episode. And like a bolt of lightning, the awakening happened.

Here was a closed door. And we called whoever we thought was good with opening a closed door. We trusted the expert's expertise (though we had no first hand knowledge of it), accepted his advice, did not protest his workmanship and moved on.

The question that keeps coming back to me is, do we do it the same way with all closed doors in life? Almost every moment of our lives, we deal with situations like my closed door. And we do turn to the expert__some of us call HIM/HER God__but do we practise the same level of detachment from outcome and place the same amount of 'implicit' trust? Why do we, in life situations, actually try to control what the expert is doing to us? To be sure, when we resist God working on us, we are trying to control. A chip here, a knock there, a lost job, an emotional separation....all these are signs that the God is working on us., doing what is best to get us past that closed door.

But we want instant gratification. The locksmith gets an hour to open the door, but how much are we willing to give God? Without even wanting to know, how complicated our situation is, we expect instant solutions from God. And when that does not happen, we make sweeping and banal judgments like, 'God is not answering my prayers', 'Does God exist?', 'Is God X better than a God Y?'.

How naive can we be? We will trust our locksmith to physically open a door, but we question the best locksmith in the Universe__the one who opens a new door every time one closes?

Learnings:
1. Every closed door will open
2. It requires faith and patience.
3. Faith that the Universe's best locksmith is at work on our door(s) and patience that this wait is part of a larger, personalized cosmic design for us!