Open Doors

For the Love of Michael 

 “Ask, and it will be given to you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you.”  Matthew 7.7

 

"Then said Jesus unto them again, Verily, verily, I say unto you, I am the door of the sheep."   John 10:7

The last thing I ever want to do is take somebody's life and turn it into a bible lesson or a moral.  It dismisses the uniqueness of the person--and that is especially true for Michael.  I knew him in Louisiana and only barely knew how much trouble he got into with drugs. He never lost his smile, however, that lit up the room -- even when he showed up unexpectedly in Atlanta and with a shaved head.  

My youngest son asked him bluntly as only kids can--"Why is your head bald?"  Michael gave back an equally honest answer--"I have been very sick and the medicine did this to me."  I stood there chastened. 

Such began several months as we tried to answer his question--"What does it mean to live and die?"  He had several months to live after a misdiagnosis.  The symptoms were not due to his wild life but the cancer, which was treatable when caught early.  It was way too late.  

The turning point for Michael came in a library where I worked.   Michael was pacing, agitated and wondering what good a bucket list is for somebody who is going to die. His eyes were wild and unfocused.  I went over to the door, shut it and locked it.  I asked him to try to open the door without touching the lock.  So he pulled hard at the door, cussed at it, until that is....he heard me open another door on the other side of the room.  

"What did you hear," I asked him?  

"That other door just opened," he said.

"Right.  You will never get back to your life as you knew it. The promise is that another door will open for you."  

It registered for him. He calmed down, even sat down on the sofa.  Michael saw for the first time that hope for him was not through a locked door, but another door that would open.  

Now I can't explain why he experienced and understood it that way.  But once he let go as life as he had known it, he took began to live with the new life he now had.  He wrote poetry, visited cancer patients, planned his funeral as a "service of gratitude."  In fact, he had 12 urns made for his ashes, and he gave them away to others.  "Well, that is YOU...Michael," I said.  

 

Here's where I do not want to ruin the story.  

 

The old saying is true. When one door closes in life, God opens another.  Remember!  I did not say that “when God closes a door.”  Life closes doors.  We have the God-given free will to see what door God will open next.  

The other old saying is true.  Doors are locked from the inside by us.  Michael opened a door to his life preparing for the next life.  A bunch of us still taste that life Michael found.