Sunday, October 30, 2011

Doors

Anti! Anti! Anti! 

Anti! Anti! Anti! 
This is the name that Kirsten and I shared for the past week. In repetitions of three and all. We were staying at the children's home in Kokhana, where all week we played with, hugged, and basically just loved all of the adorable kids who live there. I have to admit though that we were quite popular there, hence the shouts of Anti! that would reverberate through the home whenever we went up on the roof to play with the kids. They all wanted us to watch them jump rope, to play 'hankey pankey,' swing them around, or just pick them up and love them :). 

At times the cries for attention would be a bit overwhelming, so we would have to make a retreat into our room. The beauty of this was that the kids would follow us, but we had an insanely hard door to open so only us and the very strongest of the kids were even able to get into the room! And thankfully the strong kids were also the older ones, and they didn't have the desire to barge into our room whenever they wanted :). 

Now prepare yourself, because believe it or not I'm not going to write the rest of this post about the amazing kids, but about the doors. If you're absolutely dying to read a post about the kids just practice patience, I promise I'll write one. If you don't have patience though, be thankful because Kirsten has already written about it from her perspective! Here's a link to her blog: http://outsidehistory.blogspot.com/2011/10/at-children-home.html 

Anyway. Back to the doors. I'm sure you're all totally stoked to hear about that. 

But like I said before, the door to our room in the children's home was really hard to open. I'm talking pull the handle, lower your shoulder, and ram your way into the room hard to open. Which is ironic, because our room at the Debortoli's doesn't even have a latch! You can pretty much breathe on the door and it will swing wide open. Now, if you've worked at Kidder Creek then I'm pretty sure you know what's coming up next, that's right, a TEACHABLE MOMENT!! 

While I've been here, something I've been struggling a lot with (and I'm going to guess some of you who read this are too) is how we can pray for healing and salvation for years and years for people who we love in the States and have nothing happen, but before I'm even in Nepal for one whole week BOOM I see more healings and salvations than I have in the entire rest of my life. Um, what? 

Late one night when I couldn't sleep from all the dogs barking in the neighborhood, my mind started to wander and fixed itself on odd things. Like, the doors. All I could think about was how how funny it was that the door to one of our rooms could be so easy to open, and the other so hard. 

And then it hit me. When christians pray for specific things and people, we are asking God to open a door. Why doesn't the same thing happen every time we pray? Because just like there can be so many different types of doors in the world, there are even more different types of people.  

Some people are like the door we have at the DeBortoli house. For one reason or another, many of the people we've been praying for here in Nepal are like these doors. We pray, the door swings WIDE open, and miracles happen right in front of our eyes. 

But some people and things are like the door we had at the children's home, and we can pray and fast and call out to God all we want, but what we're praying for still doesn't happen. Frustrating? Yeah, to say the least. 

But Miriam Webster says this about doors: that they are "a usually swinging or sliding barrier by which an entry is closed and opened." So, a door is not a door unless it can open. An unmovable door is called a wall. 

And the Bible says this about christians: "In him too you are being built together to become a dwelling in which God lives by his Spirit." Ephesians 2:22. So if you are a christian, you have the Holy Spirit in you, and he is capable of all things. 

All doors can be opened. All Christians have the power to open those doors. Miracles CAN happen in the States, just as they're happening here. People you know and love who are sick CAN be healed. They're problems are just doors, and while we may not know where the key is or how long it's going to take for us to break it down, we can still push and look as hard as we can until we don't need to anymore. And we can do this in CONFIDENCE that our prayers are being heard and that they have power behind them! Because it's not like we're sending up requests to some far off land that we can't even imagine. No, we're talking to the being who is living within us.

Unfortunately, sometimes the door is not opened and we don't know why. Maybe God hasn't revealed where the key is, or at least he hasn't yet, and we're left wondering why God hasn't helped us out with that specific door. I don't know why this happens, but I do know that it definitely doesn't mean that we should stop praying and trying to open all the different doors that we might see in our lives and the lives of others.  

Sometimes, the key is actually lying INSIDE the very room behind the locked door you're trying to open. Here's a literal example (and it just so happens to be my favorite memory of this trip so far!): Last Tuesday night, basically everyone that we've been doing ministry with here in Nepal was invited to Marshal and Lily's house for pancakes and worship (best combination ever? Um, yes). 

While at the children's home, our main form of transportation is on the backs of Nelson's and Denesh's motorcycles (so much fun!), so the plan was for me to go with Nelson and Kirsten to go with Denesh. The only problem was that Nelson's bike was at the YWAM team's house, so we had to make the ten minute walk there, pick up his bike, and then go to Marshal and Lily's. When we got there though, we realized that the YWAM team had already left, and had locked Nelson's helmet and keys inside the house! Definitely a major problem. 

But immediately I knew that there had to be a way to get in, there's robberies in Kathmandu all the time so breaking in couldn't be too hard, right? After circling the little flat a couple times and fruitlessly trying different doors and windows, we were about to give up. But then Nelson said that he was so frustrated because he could see the doors from the window, we were so close yet so far! So I asked him to show me where they were, and they were about 5 feet away from the window, on top of a dresser, and underneath his helmet. And that's when MacGyver took over my body. 

See, the window was open, but there are bars over all the windows here so we couldn't just climb in. Kind of like prison, except they're designed to keep people out, not in. Anyway, we pushed the door open as wide as we could, and then looked all around the area for a long pole or something to knock the helmet off the dresser with. Nelson came up with a long strip of rubber tubbing. Looking back I probably don't want to know what it's real purpose was, but at the time it was the exact length of what we needed! 

So with me pressed against the window trying to push the helmet off the dresser and Nelson trying to shine his cell phone on it so I could see, we began what would end up being a half hour long struggle to retrieve the keys, all so we could get to our precious pancakes and worship! 

After finally pushing the helmet off, the next step was scooping the keys off the floor and pulling them through the window. The rubber tubbing was no use in this area, so we had to discard that pretty quickly. We tried a lot of things; pipes, poles, anything that we thought would work. But we only succeeded in dragging the keys all over the floor, sometimes making horrible screeches that sent shivers up our spines. 

We were about to give up, when Nelson somehow comes up with a sickle that would be perfect for scooping, but wasn't long enough. So out comes my ponytail and out come my headphones, and with these two things we somehow tied the sickle to the end of one of the poles, scooped the keys off the floor, and then zoomed away through Kathmandu to get to our pancakes and worship :). Definitely an experience I'll never forget! 

Personally, I think that a lot of the doors in the States aren't as difficult to open as we think, we maybe just are thinking of them as walls instead of doors. I don't know why some of the doors aren't opened, I don't know why it seems like God just hands out keys at random sometimes. All I know is what the Bible tells me, and that's that the Holy Spirit lives within me. And I'm not going to let any kinds of doubts about whether my prayer will 'work' stop me from ramming myself up against every closed door I see! 

Tara Praying. Best Experience. 
One last story. Yesterday and today I've had a pretty bad cold, bad enough to tell the cutest little girl in the world that I couldn't sing her a song because my throat hurt. So what does she do? She prays. She prayed over my sinuses and my sore throat and the best part of all of this is after she prayed I felt SO MUCH BETTER! All this time I had been praying for people and being shocked when it worked, and then it actually happened to ME! So cool amazing :). 





  

3 comments:

  1. i love this so much. what a great teachable moment. just saying that again makes me laugh. :)

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  3. What a great metaphor, Lu. It makes me think of doors on all sides: the doors of others that can be difficult to open up to me, my own doors behind which I can hide and which are difficult for me to open up to others, and God's doors. I wonder if God has purposely difficult doors to open. Why not? I know He has walls, which are necessary for our good - they remind us that He is God and we are not. I wonder what good purpose difficult doors might serve for us.

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