The Keys We Carry

After worship on Sunday, I showed one of our young people how to lock and unlock the door just outside my office. I told him how it worked, then I handed him the key, as his family and I stood there and watched.

It's a heavy lock that takes some coordination–pushing the key in and turning it at the same time. He struggled at first as he tried to figure out how he was going to do what he knew the door could do. As he stayed laser-focused on the lock, I watched him–noting how the key looked larger in his hands, how a small furrow of concentration had formed on his face, and the way he adjusted his grip on the key and tried again.

At some point I started to reach out to help him, but just as I did, the lock snapped into place. He looked up, delighted with himself. Then he did it again–unlocked the door, then locking it again–as if to ensure that he had truly mastered the lock.

I've been thinking about that moment all week. About my hand starting to move toward his. About what would have happened if I had gotten there BEFORE that lock snapped.

Spiritual director and writer Caroline Oakes has a book called Practice the Pause, in which she draws on both contemplative Christian tradition and brain science to make a case for the transformative power of the intentional pause. Her argument, in part, is that our fight-or-flight wiring makes us reactive–and that we can literally rewire our brains, over time, by practicing the habit of stopping before we respond. What she's describing isn't passivity. It's the discipline of creating just enough space between stimulus and action for something other than instinct to operate.

I almost took that moment from this young person. Not out of cruelty, but out of instinct. My hand moved before my brain did, which is precisely the response Oakes is talking about–that deeply grooved impulse to fix, to smooth, to resolve. And sometimes that impulse is exactly right. But other times, what looks like helping is really just our own discomfort with watching someone struggle, and our need to relieve the tension.

Sometimes the most faithful thing we can do is leave the tension alone and see what it becomes. Barbara Brown Taylor suggests that it might become like salvation. She describes salvation as something that not only happens at the end of a life, but as something that happens every time someone with a key uses it to open a door they could lock instead. In other words, salvation–wholeness–is the act of choosing to make a way where you could have just as easily made a wall. Stepping back and letting someone else learn they have what it takes to turn the key themselves makes such a way. 

That young person didn't need me to unlock the door. He needed me to hand him the key and then let him work, let him grow, let him become…more whole. Which makes me wonder if practicing the pause in other areas of life might be an invitation worth accepting.

So this week, I invite you to consider the various places in your life–your relationships, your work, your church community–and ponder whether you have been reaching out to help when what's really needed is a pause. And consider if perhaps you, too, might instinctually be interrupting something beautiful trying to unfold.

We are people who carry keys. The question is always what we do with them.

On the journey with you,
Pr. Melissa

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