mama3girls-phnig

I did not set out to write about doors.

That would make this sound more organized than it was.

What happened was simpler and stranger: I kept noticing them. Front doors. Locked doors. Chapel doors. Open doors. Closed doors. The kind you walk through, the kind you stand in front of, and the kind you don’t realize you’ve been staring at until God—or life, or grief, or your own children—points and says, Look again.

For the last month or two, doors have been everywhere.

And if doors are the image I keep seeing now, shine was the word that stayed with me during Covid.

I don’t think many of us actually loved Covid, even though Facebook sometimes made it seem like we were all supposed to. Actually, that’s not even true. Facebook during Covid wasn’t cheerful—it was polarized. I rarely saw posts that weren’t either predicting the end of the world or trying very hard to convince everyone this was some strange extended family retreat where we were all baking sourdough and discovering ourselves–together–alone.

Everywhere I turned, the news rarely felt hopeful. Everything felt split. Dichotomous. And that kind of split—the kind where everything becomes either all dark or all light—changes people.

Sometimes I think that in order to shine, certain doors get forced upon you.

My father-in-law passed away from Covid. His name was Jerry. His name probably still is Jerry, but I don’t want to get too deep into biblical name changes and what exactly happens to consciousness after someone has fallen asleep in Christ, because that is a whole theological rabbit trail and I do not have enough coffee for it. What I really want to say is simple: Hi, Papa Jerry. I love you. And thank you. Thank you for releasing me in ways I didn’t understand at the time. Thank you for helping me shine.

Papa Jerry and my father could not have been more different when it came to doors. I grew up in a home—well, technically two homes, because I split time between the dome during the week and the lake house on weekends—where I’m not even sure locks mattered. We may have had locks. If my dad reads this, he can fact-check me in the comments. But even if we had them, I’m not sure they would’ve done much good because there were always people coming in and out.

My parents lived with their arms wide open.

And yes, I hear Creed as I write that—the very song my daughter danced to with her father at her wedding.

“With arms wide open
Under the sunlight
Welcome to this place
I’ll show you everything”

What’s the point of a lock when your philosophy is essentially: Come on in?

My dad’s philosophy was to let people in. Papa Jerry’s philosophy was almost the opposite: keep the world out. Not because he was cruel. Not because he was paranoid. Because he knew something about danger. He had good reason. He was a police officer, and not just any police officer. When he retired from the San Antonio Police Department, the city honored him with a medal of distinction. He had seen enough of humanity at its worst to know that darkness is not theoretical.

Papa Jerry would not tolerate a bully. Not on a football field. Not in real life. And he certainly wasn’t taking chances with his family.

I will never forget one of the first things Jimmy said to me while we were dating. He was leaving my apartment in College Station. It was late—around midnight. He turned around before leaving and said, “Hey. Don’t forget to lock the door behind me.” I still remember how my breath caught.

It sounds so small, doesn’t it? Lock the door. But the way he said it made me suddenly aware of something I had spent my entire life unconscious of.

Darkness exists.

I think I knew that already. But when you wander around with your head in the clouds and you assume the best of people and the world–and nothing bad has really happened so far that put your life in mortal danger?

Everybody knows that at some level our lives are in danger. Our souls know it too but mine didn’t seem to care? Who knows. What I do know is that our psyches often prefer to soften the danger: minimize it, pretend it isn’t really there. Or maximize it. Mine is a minimizer. Or so I thought…we’ll get to that later in the post.

Jimmy made me conscious of it.

That date night I said, back in 1998, I said, “Okay. Thanks. I’ll lock it.” I closed the door behind him. I turned the lock. And I stood there in silence. My first thought wasn’t fear. It was:

Wow. He really cares about me.

And there’s the conundrum.

Sometimes the same action can feel like fear… or love.

Sometimes locking a door is not about living afraid. Sometimes it is about protection.

Years later, after Jimmy relaxed a little on his very strict door-locking philosophy—which, frankly, became impractical once we had kids, two large dogs, constant traffic, and a house that functioned like Grand Central Station—I asked him something. I mean, how many keys do we need to give out before we aren’t techinally “safe” anymore… So I poetically asked my husband a question, because that’s how I ask difficult questions. He stared at me blankly.

This is normal. My husband prefers concrete language.

So I translated. “Do you think your dad being a police officer made it harder for him to believe that good still exists in the world?” Jimmy paused. Then he said, Yes.

He explained that jobs like policing or military service change you. Most days are boring. That part surprised me. We tend to imagine constant danger, but Jimmy explained that often it’s not the constant adrenaline—it’s the constant awareness.

You know danger exists. You know at some point, it will be go time. You need someone on your six. Because, you just don’t know when. Why am I thinking about Jesus and His commentary on the end of the world? (Matthew 24:36, NRSVUE)

That vigilance never fully leaves. Jimmy compared it to soldiers. And I thought: yeah… that tracks.

I have never been a soldier. Unless motherhood counts, and I hesitate to say that because I do not want an actual soldier reading this and feeling slapped across the face. But holy crap—that level of readiness? That constant preparedness? That is intense. I did not walk through any recruiting-office doors. My friend, Hunter did. I love my friend Hunter. He is an important person and also special ops/retired but still has access to certain special ops things–that he won’t tell me about. But he will allude to the fact that the world is dark and that I can believe my husband and his father.

But Hunter knows I would be a total liability on the battlefield, unless the military suddenly develops a need for highly trained, “student”, emotional support cheerleaders. If so, I’m available. (Shoutout to @omimusiconline.)

I can absolutely yell motivational things and keep morale high. I do this at landsales, where I met Hunter. But the last time I checked, the Air Force (or any other military branch for that matter) wasn’t recruiting cheerleaders. Trust me—we looked.

My daughter Allison once considered joining the United States Air Force. I kept very, very, very quiet about how nervous that made me. I cheerleaded for her to join, through fear. Which is some kind of courage though I am not sure the United States military would agree. I did not want to silence the child’s heart. If one of my daughters feels called to walk through a door that reveals courage and sacrifice, I refuse to stand in front of that door just because it scares me to lose them indefinitely.

Why? You ask dear reader. Good question. I know that the other side of the door is Jesus…so that’s how I suddenly became an overnight cheerleader for daughters who were considering the military.

And honestly, if you know Allison, you know she would do it. She probably would pray about it. But we are apples and oranges in our rationale for the prayer.

Allison would lay down her comfort for someone else in a heartbeat. Which is probably why she became a nurse. She works labor and delivery, and she is exceptional. Cool under fire. Sharp. Strong. Compassionate. She’d make a terrifyingly effective tiny general. She’s already gotten a daisy award inside of her first year.

(She’d be a cute general, too. But I don’t think that’s why she got the daisy award–though I constantly remind her that her looks are nowhere near the best thing about her.)

Nobody cares how pretty you are in battle.

Battle cares about heart. Battle cares about clarity. Battle cares about composure. Allison has all three. Unless one of her sisters or mother piss her off, and then she absolutely compose herself with boundaries. But that’s for a different writing assignment. And I am choosing to save it until after she has had our male grandchild…

The moral of this story inside the story is that she didn’t join the Air Force. Nursing school happened instead. She still may join the Air Force when/if she pursues to continue onto Nurse Practicioner schooling. But currently, she’s pregnant, and I suspect military service is off the table. Also, her husband Blake barely wants her walking downstairs without holding the rail. I am going to become a fly on the wall when she tells Blake she is enrolling in the Air Force. When/if that ever happens. I suspect I will be taking Blueberry (our grandchild) when that conversation happens.

Blake is fascinating to me because Blake grew up in Bridgeport, where people also don’t seem overly obsessed with locks. And yet he is fiercely protective of my daughter. Recently I walked into their house and the front door was unlocked. Immediately I heard myself say, “Hey. Keep the door locked during the day, okay? Not a bad idea.”

My daughter looked at me and said, “Mom… what’s going on? Blake’s upstairs. We’ve never locked our doors.” And I stopped. Because there it was. The shift. Somewhere along the way, I had become the one thinking about locks. The one thinking about doors. The one holding both philosophies at once: open and closed, welcome and protect, light and dark.

And I think this is where God started showing me something.

When two people love each other well—really well—and both are doing the work to understand each other, something fascinating happens. Does darkness still exist? Absolutely. Do hard things still happen? Of course. But something changes in the color and texture of it: harmony.

I started thinking about my dad’s old art classroom. He had this color wheel. Every color of the rainbow. If you spin the wheel fast enough, do you know what happens? The colors disappear. Everything turns white. I hope I’m remembering that correctly, Dad. But I’m pretty sure I am.

And that image has stayed with me because relationships can work like that. Dark and light. Pain and joy. Difference and disagreement. Spin them fast enough—not through avoidance, but through real movement, real growth, real mutual effort—and something surprising happens. The individual colors stop competing.

Light wins.

Not because darkness never existed, but because harmony changes what you see.

That, to me, is marriage at its best. Not sameness. Not losing individuality. Two distinct people becoming so attuned to each other that together they project something protective and luminous into the world. And family isn’t meant to keep that light trapped inside one home. Light spreads.

learned that while teaching Sunday school. At my old church, I once created a lesson using an inflatable globe and a flashlight. I wanted the kids to understand something about Jesus, so I pointed to the region where Jesus began much of his ministry by shining the light over Galilee. Then I asked them, “Do you think Jesus stayed only there?” Children, bless them, always answer with tremendous confidence.

“Yes!”

So I took them on a field trip. To a bathroom. Because theology is glamorous sometimes. We packed ourselves into a tiny bathroom—maybe seven by six feet—and turned off the lights. It was dark enough to make the point. Then I shined the flashlight onto the globe. Suddenly, light spread.

I asked, “Where are we?” I was trying to keep everybody in their seats, so I kept the globe close and put my own finger on Texas. It was a practical solution. Sunday school theology is beautiful, but so is not having ten children climbing over each other in a dark bathroom. Then Esther called it out. “Right there!” And she was right.

Jesus didn’t stay there. His light traveled all the way around the world… and through the doors of your heart.

That memory came back to me recently because of a place outside Austin called Chapel Dulcinea. If you’ve never been, it has the quirkiest, most welcoming magic to it. It feels a little like Hogwarts meets Lord of the Rings. Everywhere you turn there’s some nook, some cranny, some unexpected delight. Something to discover around every corner. There are walkways paved with donor bricks, hidden corners to explore, and yes—an actual wizarding academy.

My girls immediately wanted to join. I had to remind them, “That is not what we are doing today.” What we were doing was helping Tatum envision her wedding. Though honestly, none of them wanted to leave. One daughter missed pickleball. My pregnant daughter skipped lunch and her nap. Which meant I was missing my nap. But to be fair–nobody wanted to go.

Yeah. It’s that kind of place.

The whole experience felt bigger than the building. Warm. Human. Peaceful. Full of story.

I had connected online with Gordon, the gifted heart behind much of that place’s magic. He once told me something about anger that stuck. People say others make them angry. But healthy people own their anger. That landed. Because anger, like doors, tells us something about boundaries. About what gets let in. About what gets shut out. About what we protect.

By the time we visited the chapel, I was tired. I finally grabbed a beer from the on-site bar—yes, there is beer at 1 p.m., and yes, that somehow makes perfect sense there—and sat with my dog while my girls kept exploring. The Texas Hill Country light was pouring in. Everything felt luminous.

And then there was the chapel door. Closed. That sparked a debate. Should Tatum walk down the aisle toward an open door or a closed one? Maddie preferred open. Ally preferred closed. I suggested maybe one sister could open the door at just the right moment while the other would have an upcoming role of fluffing the wedding veil they all are sharing for each of their weddings. Think long cathedral train. Simple dress. But the point for me as a mom who has daughters that want both sisters to be their Maid of Honor is to give them jobs. Keep harmony.

Classic mom strategy.

Later, my girls posed in front of that closed door, kissing each other on the cheek, laughing, with the dog perfectly stationed between them like an overqualified wedding coordinator. I snapped the photo, sent it to their sister and she said these words to me, “Oooo interesting convo. I see both sides but maybe open.”

As I sat there, beer in hand, dog beside me, daughters laughing somewhere nearby, reflecting on how alarming doors seem to be showing up all around me, what God is trying to show me, all the spinning colors in my mind started merging.

My father. Papa Jerry. Jimmy. Soldiers. Marriage. Church. Light. Dark. Open. Closed.

And I turned. There was a sign on the door. A literal sign. On a literal door. About doors.

It said:

“I am the door you’ve been looking for :)”

I just stared at it. Eventually I laughed, because I have a beer in my hand and it was on the door to a bar that is open at 1:00 pm.

Because what else do you do? It was perfect. A sign. On a door. On a bar door. About doors that are signs.

I saw the signs, y’all.

And I wish I could tell you I understood exactly what God was trying to say. I don’t. Not fully. I still don’t know which doors should stay locked. I don’t always know which doors should remain open. I want to believe in a world where God protects us and we can leave doors open.

I don’t always know when protection becomes fear, or when openness becomes naïveté.

But I know this: when dark and light are held in loving motion long enough, light wins.

And I would sincerely like to know, too— Can you give me a little more context, God?

“If I had just one wish
Only one demand
I hope (s)he’s not like me
I hope (s)he understands”

What do you think? I would love to hear from you in the comments!

In Him,

Jenn