A few years ago, an inspirational young woman who had been called to religious life shared with me one of her more humorous moments from the summer prior to leaving her life as a layperson.
She explained that she had agreed to house-sit for a family who had gone out of town. One evening, when she was leaving the home, she locked the house and set the alarm but somehow managed to leave her purse containing not only the house keys but also her car keys inside. She stood outside a rather isolated home at night, without her keys, without her phone, and without any apparent solution.
“You’ll never guess what I did next,” she said.
“You waited ‘til your parents sent a rescue crew?” I asked.
“No. That would have taken too long.”
“You broke a window?”
“That would set off the alarm.”
“You cried.”
“Uh, no.”
“Okay, what’d you do?”
“I prayed—and then I remembered the house had a doggy door.”
“A doggy door.”
“Yep, a doggy door.”
So acting on her divinely-inspired idea, the girl was then able to slip through the small square hole without setting off the alarm and retrieve her things.
As entertaining as the story is, it actually offers much more than a chuckle. It provides a profound analogy of what it means to be a faithful follower of Christ. Doggy doors—those God-given and sometimes strange-seeming ideas of how our lives should be lived or how our problems should be solved—inevitably present themselves. The problem is that they often seem so unlikely or impossible that it is easy to doubt they are actually part of God’s plan. Of course, Biblical history has shown that it is precisely in their unlikeliness that these moments provide the greatest opportunity for the faithful to glorify God.
Whether it is Noah’s building of an ark (with a hefty number of animals in tow) prior to any signs of a flood (Genesis 6:1-22), Abraham’s becoming the father of all nations when he was 100 and his wife was by all human standards barren (Genesis 21:5), or Moses’s leading the Israelites out of Egyptian captivity and parting the Red Sea in the process (Exodus 14:21), instances that illuminate the beauty of God’s divine plan commonly contain elements of the unexpected.
Consider further what is arguably the most important event in Christian history–the birth of our Lord. At the annunciation of His coming birth, Mary is presented with a plan she never expected. An angel tells her that she will conceive and bring forth a son named Jesus, that the child will be great and called the Son of the Highest, and that He will reign forever over the house of Jacob. When Mary asks how this could be, given that she has never known a man, the angel explains further:
The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Highest will overshadow you; therefore, also the Holy One who is to be born will be called the son of God…. For with God nothing will be impossible. (Luke 1:35-37)
Surely this is not the kind of plan Mary would have conjured on her own. She is a young woman and engaged to be married. A baby out of wedlock and from anyone else would certainly be considered a reason for condemnation and possibly death. Faced with the impracticalities of the situation, any other woman would have likely questioned or second guessed God’s plan. Mary, however, simply seizes the moment to act in the purest form of faith, stating, “Behold the maidservant of the Lord! Let it be to me according to your word”(Luke 1:38). And because of her response–her willingness to follow God’s lead–Christ enters the world to save sinners.
In a culture that is all too quick to doubt the magnitude of God’s hand, our own doggy doors can open the world to a God who is still very much in control. Let us therefore use the approaching Lenten season to consider what doggy doors stand before us, and more importantly, ask for faith to actually crawl through them.
Copyright © 2013, Krissie Allen
Krissie Allen
Krissie Kubiszyn Allen is an attorney, teacher, and Catholic mother of four living in Birmingham, Alabama, where she enjoys writing poetry, short stories and essays. Visit her also at her website, Choosing God.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.