I value a letter I received from author and psychologist Larry Crabb a few years ago. He even quoted me in one of his books, THE PRESSURE’S OFF. In that same book, he tells a wonderful story from his childhood to illustrate our need to delight in God through adversity. He writes:
“One Saturday afternoon, I decided I was a big boy and could use the bathroom without anyone’s help. So I climbed the stairs, closed and locked the door behind me, and for the next few minutes felt very self-sufficient.
Then it was time to leave. I couldn’t unlock the door. I tried every ounce of my three-year-old strength, but I couldn’t do it. I panicked. I felt again like a very little boy as the thought went through my head, ‘I might spend the rest of my life in this bathroom.’
My parents, and likely the neighbors, heard my desperate scream.
‘Are you okay?’ Mother shouted through the door she couldn’t open from the outside. ‘Did you fall? Have you hit your head?’
‘I can’t unlock the door!’ I yelled. ‘Get me out of here!’
I wasn’t aware of it right then, but Dad raced down the stairs, ran to the garage to find the ladder, hauled it off the hooks, and leaned it against the side of the house just beneath the bathroom window. With adult strength, he pried the bathroom window open and climbed into my prison, walked past me, and, with that same strength, turned the lock and opened the door.
‘Thank you Daddy,’ I said, and ran out to play.
That’s how I thought the Christian life was supposed to work. When I get stuck in a tight place, I should do all I can to free myself. When I can’t, I should pray. Then God shows up. He hears my cry–‘Get me out of here! I want to play!’–and unlocks the door to the blessings I desire.
Sometimes he does. But now, no longer three years old and approaching sixty, I’m realizing the Christian life doesn’t work that way. And I wonder, are any of us content with God? Do we even like him when he does’t open the door we most wanted opened–when a marriage doesn’t heal, when rebellious kids still rebel, when friends betray, when financial reverses threaten our comfortable way of life, when the prospect of terrorism looms, when health worsens despite much prayer, when loneliness intensifies and depression deepens, when ministries die?
God has climbed through the small window into my dark room. But he doesn’t walk by me to turn the lock that I couldn’t budge. Instead, he sits down on the bathroom floor and says, ‘Come sit with me.’ He seems to think that climbing into the room to be with me matters more than letting me out to play.
I don’t always see it that way. ‘Get me out of here if you love me.’ I scream.”
Friends, as Larry Crabb implies, the choice is ours. Either we can keep asking God to give us what we think will make us happy, to escape our locked room and run to the playground of blessings, or we can accept God’s invitation to sit with him, for now, and seize the opportunity to know him better and represent him well in the power of that encounter.
May you think of this each and every time you lock the bathroom door from now on.