“Be joyful in hope, patient in affliction, faithful in prayer” - Romans 12: 12 (NIV). 

The nation of Israel had migrated to Egypt where long after the patriarch Joseph had long passed on, there was a generation of new rulers who had come about without any attachment to Israel’s past role in their once liberation from famine. So, once Moses, who had escaped being killed as an infant on the orders of Pharaoh, one day, “ went out to where his own people were and watched them at their hard labour. He saw an Egyptian beating a Hebrew, one of his own people. Looking this way and that and seeing no one, he killed the Egyptian and hid him in the sand” (Exodus 2: 11-12).

Things didn’t work out as he desired. For when Pharaoh heard of the news, “he tried to kill Moses, but Moses fled from Pharaoh and went to live in Midian, where he sat down by a well” (vv 15). A door had been slammed right in the face of Moses, with his hopes of mounting a quick liberation.

This experience of Moses when one has a particular desire to achieve something is not unique. There are many episodes in the lives of believers when they feel a certain strong urge to achieve something, a matter that has been pressing them. This might be a job situation. There could be acquisition of a precious object, like land. It might be a matter of travel. Or perhaps it is offering a marriage proposal expecting a positive reciprocal affirmation. Then the door is slammed.

Such a denial may leave one confused and upset, perhaps angry with God. These emotions are only natural, except that, it doesn’t mean God has forgotten or abandoned one. After a period of forty years, finally the Lord reveals Himself in the wilderness, prompting the once impatient Moses, with a message, “Go, assemble the elders of Israel and say to them, ‘The Lord, the God of your fathers—the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob—appeared to me and said: I have watched over you and have seen what has been done to you in Egypt. And I have promised to bring you up out of your misery in Egypt into the land of the Canaanites, Hittites, Amorites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites—a land flowing with milk and honey” (vv 16-17). And the rest is history.

A door closed does not mean it is shut forever. There are cases where God is pointing you to yet another opportunity down the road. Sometimes it means to wait, for down the road, you will find the door wide open, as we see in Moses’s case.

Prayer for today: Lord Father God of Abraham, maker of heaven and earth, as a new day dawns, where I find a door closed, I start with a fresh hope, for I know where one door is closed, lies another opening, and Lord I pray you give me the patience to wait with hope, this I pray in Jesus’s name!