I love gates. Iron, wooden, old, not so much new. My first 15 years were spent on farms where my dad was the dairyman. I came to understand gates. Gates are for closing, they are for letting animals out and letting animals in. A gate is both a safety mechanism and a convenient point of access for tractors - once upon a time, and I remember that far back, it was for working horses!
Gates are visible and tangible metaphors, but are they obstacles or opportunities? Are they there to keep us out, or to invite us to open up the next stage of the path, and walk on? To open a gate, and close it behind us, is one of those actions that is both intentional and purposeful. I doubt if opening and closing a gate is ever thoughtless or careless.
In my own growth and development into the person I now am, or am becoming, I've walked through many a gate. There are those life experiences when you know that you have gone through a definite point of transition, the landscape has changed and so have you. The day I came to faith in Jesus, and decided to surrender my life to the loving service of "the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me", a gate was opened by God into a new future, and that same gate closed on a life to which I could never go back.
The words of that Billy Graham anthem, "I have decided to follow Jesus, no turning back, no turning back" are life-changing testimony, accompanied by the clicking shut of a gate on what was, and moving into a new future and a different path.
The moment of discovered vocation is also a gate, a hinge point that swings open to the next field of the life we are to live. For me that call to be a minister of the Gospel, and to spend my life as servant of the community of Christ's people was another gate opened and closed behind me. And since then many other gates, each requiring a decision of whether to open and move on, after closing that gate behind us.
I've been wondering about how and why we make the decisions we do, why we go through some gates and not others. Discerning what is good for us, and trying to fit that with where we believe God is calling us is one of the more scary and risk-laden tensions of the spiritual life.
God's voice is of the heart.
I do not therefore say all voices of the heart are God's,
And to discern his voice amongst the voices
Is that hard task to which we each are born.
I came across that anonymous verse in an old devotional long since lost. But these lines have given me significant wisdom in the big decisions. They, along with mind and heart open to Scripture, guidance from trusted friends, prayer to tell the ego to pipe down, and trying to read and understand our own life story, - these are what significantly shape our decisions when we come to another gate.
All of this perhaps explains my need to take a photo of a good gate! Obstacle or opportunity, there to halt me or give me access; but often enough, a challenge to see if I'm ready to walk another path through another field and into a wider landscape. Or so it seems to me.
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