I'll Take Door #3

Years ago when I was teaching school, I was sitting around with some fellow schoolteachers trading stories about our classroom experiences. One of my friends taught kindergarten and told of a first-day incident with a very precocious kid. They had just returned from lunch and as soon as they walked back into the classroom, this little boy walked over to the center rug and lay down on a comfortable spot. My friend walked over and knelt down beside him, quietly whispering to him, “Honey, what are you doing?”

Without moving a muscle, the boy responded, “It’s naptime. I’m going to sleep.” My friend suppressed a laugh, and then said, “Sweetie, you’re in school now. We don’t have naptime.” The boy’s eyes opened as he looked at her in disbelief. She said, “Really. So go ahead and go back to your seat."

Reluctantly, the boy sat up. After a few moments of reflection, he slowly stood up. As he walked away, my friend could hear the child muttering, “Well, I sure didn’t sign up for this.”

And don’t we all know that feeling?

I’ve had times in my life that I’ve wished I was a contestant on Let’s Make a Deal, bartering with Monty Hall, Drew Carey, or Wayne Brady. I’ve wished he would say, “So, Lynn, do you want to keep your current life, or do you want to trade it for what we have behind Door #3?” And I’ve known I would pitch it all in for Door #3 in a second! To walk away with a pool table and a hanging lamp would be such an improvement!

All week, our Tennessee roads have been icy and our yards have been blanketed in snow. Our children have been out of school an entire week! In Tennessee! This is the South, for heaven’s sake! And it would be charming if we were hearing “It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas…” on our radios, but it’s approaching the end of February and we’re getting tired of this. We did not sign up for this!

But this is such a relatively small thing. Life can hand out much more complicated obstacles that we certainly didn’t sign up for…illness, job loss, financial stress, rebellious kids, and so many other things that don’t feel like something we signed up for.

So what do we do? We’re in awful places in our lives and our options don’t include anything nearly attractive as a new pool table.

Some people begin making truly stupid choices, looking for ways to make the frustration and the inner stress go away. I won’t even begin to list here all of the bad choices a person might make when life becomes complicated…I don’t have to. We see them all around us. Some of us have made those bad choices. And some of us know that those choices just lead to further complications in life.

Our best choice when life gets hard…our only real choice…is the same choice when life is simple: Follow Jesus. We should follow him in the easy times of life; we should follow him in the difficult times of life.

Why? Because Jesus is the Light. He will always show us the way.

“When Jesus spoke again to the people, he said, ‘I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life’” (John 8:12).

Sign up for that.