"Help, I'm Locked In My Room and Can't Get Out"

I’ve read books about open doors.

I’ve written songs about closed doors. I've quoted quotes about doors. Such as, “When one door closes, another opens,” or “When one door closes, try the window,” and, “you meet your destiny through closed doors,” and then also, “Until another door opens, praise Him in the hallway”…and so on…

What I haven’t heard a lot of talk on is being locked in a room.

Two years ago I got locked in my room.

Last year I got locked in my boss’s car.
I’d like to think that it actually takes a lot of skill to get into these predicaments.

In both situations, the first thing I did was panic.
I started over-thinking the situation and about the “What if’s?”
What if the condo gets on fire?
What if the car blows up with me in it?
What if something happens to my roommate and I’m stuck in my room for a few days?”

After the panic came the restlessness.

I started cleaning my room. Not in a “Spring Cleaning-listening to Enya-whistle while you work” type of cleaning.
I started emptying out all my drawers, throwing clothes here, piling them over there. It was a disaster zone. A small dog would have been lost under my piles of clothes.

When I was in the car, I started looking through my purse and phone. Taking out all the empty gum wrappers, deleting old text messages and contacts, scrolling through facebook over…over…over…and over.

After the panic and the restlessness came the stillness.

After two large piles of give-away clothes and three piles of trash, I laid down on the bed.

Two hundred facebook posts later, I put the phone away, the radio on, and closed my eyes.

I relaxed. I took a breath in. I let a breath out.

Do you ever feel like you are locked in a room?

 Like Rapunzel, you want to let your hair out and climb out of the window, except there isn’t a window.

A job that we have to keep-because there are mouths to feed, tuitions to be paid,cars that need gas,bills that won't pay themselves. 

Becoming a parent, when it was the last thing you wanted.
Watching a loved one suffer with an addiction, knowing you have done all you could do to help the but that you can't do anymore. 

You are 55 and single. You would love to be married but the right guy or gal hasn't come along yet.  These are just a few that came to mind. 

Everyone’s “room” is different but they all share this in common: They are rooms we have to face and they are rooms we can’t escape.

After the, turning the knob over and over-hoping it will turn, to the paralysis, screaming, shouting (sometimes even at God, often times at God) and then finally the restlessness-doing everything you can do to not make you have to address the situation you are in...

You stop.  
You rest.

I am in a “room” right now. A room I would give anything to get out of.

After I started thinking about this locked room, I realized that there are important and essential things I can, if willing, learn from them.

Trust.

Eventually, my roommate got home and let me out.
Eventually, my boss called me back and told me how to unlock the car door.
Eventually, you will get you out. Maybe not the way you want, or expect,  but you will.

Be Still.

We grow up thinking that inaction is the worst thing in the world.
Gatorade and Nike adds tell us to “do, do, do” but instead, I think we need to learn how to, “be, be, be”.

Being still and silent can help us hear more clearly. Being still helps us listen to ourselves and our God.

I remember going to a counselor last year for panic attacks.  He gave me the oddest yet best advice I have ever received.

He said, “You must welcome the panic”.
Um, come again?
He said, “When you resist it and fight to keep it away, it only makes it worse. The only way to help quiet the panic and anxiety is to embrace it”.

Embrace the stillness.

Hope.

I believed that my roommate would come home, and eventually, she did.
I believed that I would get out of the car, and eventually, I did.

There are some situations we will not escape until Heaven.
I am thinking of a family friend who was just diagnosed with an incurable disease.
It’s terrible, it doesn’t make sense, and I question God, a lot.
Times like these wreck your faith.
I question why God lets bad things happen to good people?
I ask and I expect an answer. More importantly, I feel like I deserve an answer. 

Sometimes God wants us to learn a lesson in the silence. 

And in the midst of the stillness and the tears, I am reminded that He is God and I am not. 
He isn't being mean, though it feels like it.
He isn't being unfair, though circumstances tell otherwise. 

Times like these I must remind myself that my ultimate hope is not in this world, but the next.

You can cry over lost keys.

You can scream and shout over locked doors.

But whatever you do, don't lose hope.

Because one day, all that's wrong will be made right.

And when that time comes,
You won't  need the key,
You can walk right through the door,
Completely unbound, totally free.