“5:00 AM and time for the news…”
5:00 AM?
Why is the clock radio on at 5:00 AM?
The room is dark…
The sun isn’t even close to the horizon…
I reach over to turn off the radio.
“Let’s go”, says my wife.
“Huh?”
“Quick. Get a jacket and a pair of shoes!”
“What? Why?”
“The lunar eclipse!”
Jackets over our pajamas, shoes on our feet, we head out in search of the eclipse…
Being learned astronomers, we have no idea where to look…
Out the back door?
The sky is dark, and the stars are bright….
But the moon is nowhere to be seen…
Out the front door?
There it is!
We stand on the porch and watch in silence as the moon turns first to a deep orange, then to a powdery gray…
After a few minutes, my wife sighs…
“Gotta get ready for work”, she says.
“Gotta get some food!” I think.
I’ve just about finished making breakfast when I hear footsteps on the stairs.
“Let’s take one more look!” my wife calls.
I find my jacket and follow her outside, pulling the front door closed behind me.
(How often we do small things… small things we don’t even think about at the time…small things that bring great consequences later.)
After a few more minutes of moon gazing, I walk to the door and turn the handle…
At least I try to turn the handle…
It doesn’t move. The door is locked.
We are standing outside. In our pajamas. With no key.
“Wait”, I said. “I’ll just call…”
Call? Call who? With what?
We open the garage using an outside keypad…
But the door from the garage to the house is locked with a deadbolt.
We need something to open the front door…
Maybe we can find some tool in the garage…
A thin piece of cardboard?
Not rigid enough.
The knife I use in the garden?
It should work…
But it doesn’t.
Thirty minutes and a lot of effort later, we are still outside…
Mere inches from light, and heat, and hot water and food.
Mere inches…
Yet it has never seemed so far…
“We’ve got to go to work!” says my wife.
“I could break a window.”
“We’ll have to put a spare key in the garage…”
“Didn’t we already hide one there?”
We had. We found it.
A simple turn of the key, and we are inside the house.
I had worked so hard for so long to open that door…
Yet the real solution had always been so simple. So near.
How like my search for God…
I know He is near…
Yet I struggle to bridge the final gap in my own strength…
Forgetting that He has left the key, not in some hidden spot, but in plain sight…
For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith–and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God—Ephesians 2:8
