The Keyhole

Every so often I have had people blip into my life and offer tons of wisdom and then they're gone. One such lady in my life is named Karen. And I leaned upon an amazing truth she shared with me and some eagerly listening friends some years ago when talking and encouraging my son who was struggling so hard with a difficult situation in his life that he didn't understand.

"You are always wrong", Karen opened her talk with us. Something whispered to her from God in her still moment with him. She was frustrated. Her husband and her were having a disagreement and she had it all figured out, he was sadly mistaken and hugely in error, she argued with God.

"No, my daughter. You are wrong. And you are always wrong."

WHAT??

"Daughter, when you look at any situation you do it with such limited perspective. Think of it this way. Imagine that "Life" is happening inside a giant grandiose ballroom, behind a locked door with an itty bitty keyhole on that door. You, my daughter, are simply standing in the doorway trying to figure a situation out, get a handle on it, and make your verdict known. So, you peer down and look in the keyhole to gaze through to the ballroom...and you think you are seeing the fullness of what is happening in that huge room.

But imagine if I were to open that door - you'd suddenly see things that were never in your scope of vision, never even imagined, happening in corners of the room and all throughout the room that fill in the fullness of the story.

Daughter, I LIVE in the room and you live in the hallway. You can't know the fullness of your husband's perspective, and you know SO little of the situation that you are simply wrong, and you are wrong all the time because you are never going to know the millions of details necessary to walk through your days and possibly think you understand enough to be right."

Karen finished and hung her head for a few moments. Slowly a smile crept across her face and she looked up with a tear trickling down her cheek: "And girls, when I realized this truth, this huge weight lifted from me. A burden was gone. The burden that I had to know, that I had to understand fully, that I had to weigh through and figure it all out, that I had to be right.

GONE!!

And with that, girls, came freedom. Unbelievable freedom."

My son doesn't totally get it yet. I'll just store it away and pull it out in those delicate moments when such powerful truth can rock his life and change his heart.

This truth has popped into my mind so much lately as I trudge through tough economic times with worse stuff predicted for us just over the horizon. I don't have to understand it. I don't have to figure it out. I don't have to be right. I just have to hang out in the hallway knowing that God is amongst it all, in the ballroom, dancing and working it all out for good in ALL OF US!!

Thank you Karen. I miss you!