Door Jam

Occasionally my husband has been asked to teach a Bible study at the United Nations in Vienna, Austria. As might be expected, the facility is very secure. It takes special permission to get in. There are security guards when you leave.



After he finished one day, I followed him out through the revolving door. Revolving doors are comprised of three or four panels. I think this one had four. My mistake was that I followed him into the same panel. The spacing in these revolving door panels must have been designed for just one person. I should have known that since the security is so tight. I barely fit behind him.

Unfortunately, my big bag did not fit. I was able to get out of the building myself, but my purse was hung in the revolving door. You can imagine my chagrin at having to make my husband wait for me while I asked a guard for help. The guard tried unsuccessfully to retrieve my purse from the inside. He finally had to go to the control room and ask the engineer to release the control on the door. Then he reached in, got my purse and told me to come back through and retrieve it.

I made an embarrassing mistake, but I got over it. I was much more fortunate than 492 people who perished in flames in a 1942 fire in the Cocoanut Grove, a popular night club in Boston, Massachusetts. One of the reasons for the large number of deaths was the single revolving door at the entrance. As the panicked mob attempted to use the door to escape, it became jammed, trapping many of them between the door and the crowd pushing toward it.

Jesus is the Door to Heaven. There is no entrance except through Him. There is no possibility of a door jam because He greets us one by one as we come to Him in faith.

If we don't go through the Door, we would spend eternity in everlasting flames. When the end of time has come, there will be no need for security. There will be gates of splendor but they will never be closed.

And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, made ready as a bride adorned for her husband... It had a great and high wall, with twelve gates... In the daytime (for there will be no night there) its gates will never be closed; and they will bring the glory and the honor of the nations into it; and nothing unclean, and no one who practices abomination and lying, shall ever come into it, but only those whose names are written in the Lamb's book of life (Revelation 21:2,12, 25).