You Have Two Choices

A contemplation.

Contemplate…

Picture a gate.

It can be wood, iron, chain link. Doesn’t matter. But it’s yours. It has your name on it. Made just for you.

Your name is so dear.

Its design is your favorite kind and just through your gate is paradise. Made just for you. Thing is, the gate is less than half your width. But you can get though, if you squeeze. Yes, it’s a skinny gate… so skinny it’s a little painful, even constricted, to squeeze though… you have to really suck in. But you can do it if you really want to.

But you can also get around the gate because your gate is connected to nothing outside of it, no fencing. Just wide-open space. So why would you even bother with the gate, right? It’s super easy to just bypass your made-just-for-you gate if you want. You don’t have to go through your special gate, designed just for you with your dear name on it in your favorite fonts, materials, and colors. You are more than welcome to say “no” to your gate.

It's just that going around your beloved gate, though it gets you to the other side effortlessly, doesn’t deliver you to your paradise. It leads …elsewhere. Weird, huh.

If you choose to take the wide-open way; to not accept the difficulty of squeezing through, you keep all your problems, addictions, worries, anxieties, fears, (…especially the ones you share with no one) - your darkness; you take it all with you. Forever. Just by taking the easy route.

But through your special narrow super thin suck-you-in gate, in order to move forward, though you’re broken (as we all are), you must be committed to what is before you knowing true love is beckoning you from just inside. Even though the gate is so very…thin, that you have to inch through. (I know you are spying, tempted by the wide-open easy gaping possibilities surrounding it).

Within the vortex of this, your special gate, you’ll experience the pain and freedom of forgiveness, reconciliations, humility, suffering that you don’t deserve, battle against enemies that challenge every vulnerability, and the hard choices of all manner of silly and very serious addictions. You’ll get cut and scraped and attacked. You’ll also be strengthened, obtain spiritual fortitude, unknown virtues, grace upon grace, and inexplicable peace. You’ll be surprised by love. You’ll be healed. All within that very narrow, difficult and constricted gate.

Even so, you’ll want to turn back; to slip just right or left for some s p a c e and instant gratification, perhaps a hunk of dark chocolate, or worse, to make all pain cease, where you’re free to decide for yourself what’s good and right. It’s just so much easier that way. That place where you can be king of your own court.

But you won’t enter whole out there in the wide wide open. In that vortex is an icy-hot freeze where you suffer the pangs of anxiety, unforgiveness, stinking pride, control, fear, doubt, and ultimate darkness.  There’s ample space for it though. You won’t have to work very hard at achieving any of that. Plenty of elbow room to wade in your own desires. There’s no destination. The wide-open is the destination. If you’ve made that choice, you’ve arrived. If that is “paradise” to you… let it all hang out.

The narrow gate doesn’t last as long as it feels that it lasts. Your beautifully unique narrow gate is not the destination. Once you’re through, you’re golden.

Forever.

Enter through the narrow gate, for the gate is wide and the road broad that leads to destruction, and those who enter through it are many. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and those who find it are few in number.¹

Enter through the narrow gate.

---

1. MT 7:13-14

Read some more!

• The Gift of Sight - Would you go back if you could? Would you have eyes to see?

• The Struggle With Yes and No - (and why your decision making skills feel stunted.)

• Dancing with A Dodo - (with whom or what are you partnering?)

• If You Don’t Talk About This…. (it will still happen… eventually.)