This NYTimes article explores our obsession with having multiple options:
You don’t even know how a camera’s burst-mode flash works, but you persuade yourself to pay for the extra feature just in case. You no longer have anything in common with someone who keeps calling you, but you hate to just zap the relationship.
Your child is exhausted from after-school soccer, ballet and Chinese lessons, but you won’t let her drop the piano lessons. They could come in handy. And who knows? Maybe they will.
Another way I’ve seen this tendency displayed is that many people don’t RSVP to events anymore because they want to leave their options open until the last minute. We love it when we can choose from many different things, even though research shows that “choice overload can make you question the decisions you make before you even make them, it can set you up for unrealistically high expectations, and it can make you blame yourself for any and all failures.”
Since we’re so accustomed to having 87 different kinds of deodorant to choose from, many Christians assume that God wants us to have lots of options in the rest of life too. We’re even the ones who popularized the phrase “open door” to describe different opportunities that might be part of God’s will for our lives. We figure if there’s a door open, then God must want us to at least try it.
It’s a phrase you’ll find throughout the New Testament, but it doesn’t always mean what you think it means. Consider what Paul said in 2 Corinthians 2: “When I came to Troas to preach the gospel of Christ, even though a door was opened for me in the Lord, my spirit was not at rest because I did not find my brother Titus there. So I took leave of them and went on to Macedonia.” Incredibly, Paul ignored doors that were flung open by the Lord himself!
The problem with open doors is that they’re so subjective. If I want to work at Costco (good pay, great benefits), but there are none around me hiring, does that mean God wants me to apply at Sam’s Club, where there are lots of openings? Or does he want me to move to the mainland, where there’s a Costco on every other block that’s always hiring? Or (shudder) does he want me to lower my standard of living and work at McDonald’s?
There’s actually a much older approach to open doors, going back to the time of King David. Here’s what he wrote in Psalm 19: “The law of the LORD is perfect, restoring the soul; The testimony of the LORD is sure, making wise the simple.”
Guess what’s at the root of the Hebrew word for simple? … You got it, Einstein: an “open door.”
In David’s understanding, a simple person wasn’t a stupid person. It wasn’t a person who doesn’t know anything. It’s a person who knows too much. The door to their heart and brain has been left open too long. They have a dozen different ideas about God dancing around in their head, most of them contradicting each other. They have many different directions to take in life, and they’re determined to try each one.
God wants to make us wise by pasting big neon warning signs on many of the open doors we come across in the 80-year journey we have on this earth. Unbiblical philosophies. Ungodly choices. He warns us through his testimony in the Scriptures. How much time have you spent there lately?