You knocked on my door quietly, intentionally. I heard the knock but did not open the door, or I ignored the knock altogether. I could see your light shining under the door but turned my eyes from it, buried my head or tried to block it with blankets and towels. My dark room was comfortable, as was the pain. In the darkness, I could feel my way around, but blame my tripping and falling on the blindness. I walked around the room the way one walks in the dark: unsure, but pressing forward until I hit something, anything.
At the same time that I found such comfort in the darkness, my eyes began to strain for what little light reflected from under the door on which you knocked; my legs and arms grew sore from bumping into so many things in my blindness. I began wondering what all was in that room that I simply could not see.
But I convinced myself that what little I could see from the light coming through was enough; that the fact that I could make out silhouettes was the same as seeing the whole picture of what was in front of me. I stumbled, unsure, desperate for my eyes to adjust in what seemed like unending darkness.
You knocked a little louder from time to time. You shined your light even brighter. But with the door so tightly shut, it remained dark in my room.
With tired eyes and bleeding shins, I stood before the door. I had tried to see in the dark, to feel my way around in my blindness, to find my own way. And all I was left with were tired eyes and bleeding shins … still lost, still broken, still empty, looking at a door I had long assumed was bolted shut.
But what little light you shed allowed me to see that the door was not bolted. It wasn’t locked. It wasn’t even latched. I had to do nothing more than lift my hand to the knob and pull.
So I did.
Light flooded that room of mine. Every corner, every crevasse, every object shone. Pictures and books and keepsakes that were once colorless silhouettes shone with the brilliant colors you always intended me to see.
It was not like walking out of a movie theater on a sunny day: My eyes did not need to “adjust.” My pupils were perfectly dilated for the amount of light coming from the other side of the door, which I had refused to open for so long.
I could see my way around that room of mine now. I could see—where for a lifetime, I had been too blinded by the darkness to see—the areas that needed to be dusted and cleaned. I could observe with new eyes what I’d been awkwardly trying to feel with my hands, blindly, for so long. Best of all, I could see—on the other side of the easiest (and hardest) door in the world to open—the One who had been knocking all along.
And I fell to my knees before Him and wept.
How faithful He’d been in knocking. He knew my mocking thoughts on the other side of the door; He saw my eyes roll. But He waited, knowing exactly how many knocks it would take for me to realize that on the other side of that door—where all the knocking was coming from—was the Light for which I so desperately longed, the guidance my step demanded. In His perfect time, I opened His perfect door to His perfect room.
When it was dark, I thought it was my room because I controlled when and where I could see the objects before me. But I could not see, and had no control at all. I was doing a deadly job of finding my way around that room, until I realized that I could only live in that room when I surrendered to the fact that it was His room, filled with His light.
Now I see it all.
“Light has come into the world, but men loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that his deeds will be exposed. But whoever lives by the truth comes into the light, so that it may be seen plainly that what he has done has been done through God.” John 3:19-21
